I was awarded a Professional and Organizational Development Fund (PODF) grant from the Library Grants and Awards Committee to attend the Association of Moving Image Archivists annual conference, which took place December 2–5 in Baltimore. I am grateful for the opportunity to spend a few inspiring days surrounded by smart people doing very cool work.
Before the main conference sessions began, I attended an all-day workshop: Film Restoration Essentials for Small Archives and Non-Profits taught by Fabio Paul Bedoya Huerta. This was a hands-on workshop covering post-preservation workflows on Davinci Resolve for film restoration to correct container defects such as stabilization, deflickering, clean up and recovery, grain management and color correction.
I spent a good amount of time with my BTAA AV digitization and preservation interest group co-chair from Ohio State. We attended the College & University Archives Interest Group as well as the Magnetic Media Crisis Committee (MMCC) and had a meeting with Iron Mountain about AV preservation storage. I networked with our regional colleagues from the Moving Image Preservation of Puget Sound (MIPoPS) and I was able to meet with our vendors from Aviary, George Blood and Colorlab with specific questions that are easier to ask and answer in a face-to-face setting.
I attended some thought provoking sessions including:
Mapping the Magnetic Media Landscape: Report from the National Survey
Looking Forward at the Virtual Film Bench Grant Project
Legal Brief: AI, Fair Use, and the Copyright Office
From Degralescence to Collective Action: Community-Driven Responses to the Magnetic Media Crisis
Advancing Digital Preservation Education in the U.S.: Results from DPOE-N
Preserving Local Broadcast History: Digitizing and Managing the WMAR-TV News Collection (1948-1993)
and Be Kind, Rewind: VHS Culture, Community, and the Archive
I was fortunate to hear the inspiring keynotes from Robert Newlen, Acting Librarian of Congress, and Carla Hayden, the recent outgoing Librarian of Congress. Dr. Haden spoke at Archival Screening night and received a long standing ovation before she even spoke which reminded me of the tradition at the Cannes Film Festival. I even attended a “funeral” for U-matic 3/4″ video which is now considered a dead format.
A final note from the frontiers of science fiction, DNA encoded data storage. It’s real, it’s here, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Apparently this capsule can hold 50TB of data. The makers insist playback devices for this medium, DNA sequencers, will be available “forever”.