Panel 3. Future of Materials
Date
2012-06
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Abstract
“The Enigma of Email Archives: Processing & Discovery” by Glynn Edwards; “Expanded Libraries: Developing Experimental Media Collections with Embedded Partners” by James P. Ascher; “Expanded Libraries: Managing Experimental Media Collections by Creating New Workflows” by Rice Majors
Description
"[Audio Incomplete] Moderator: Mike Kelly, Amherst College; “The Enigma of Email Archives: Processing & Discovery” by Glynn Edwards, Stanford University Libraries, Department of Special Collections
Archivists and scholars alike face problems working with email archives. While even capture and preservation present difficulties, this talk focuses instead on resolving some of the stumbling blocks by demonstrating both a method for processing email archives using a variety of tools and a user case in discovery revolving around MUSE, a software program which is still under development at Stanford.; “Expanded Libraries: Developing Experimental Media Collections with Embedded Partners” by James P. Ascher, University of Colorado Boulder
Libraries are increasingly faced with varied and unusual formats for collections including film, video, electronic, sculptural, and other materials. The University of Colorado Boulder is home to the Stan Brakhage Center for experimental media and recently we’ve begun acquiring experimental video, including the work of Woody and Steina Vasulka. Experimental video is primarily documentary in form, yet has an awareness of it’s own materiality, i.e. videos can experiment with direct manipulation of the electron beam. Libraries don’t yet quite know how to work with these sorts of materials and the community of scholars is small and tight-knit. Thus, the traditional model of get it, process it, and promote it wouldn’t work, so we sought to leverage local institutes, scholars, and teachers who simultaneously promoted the collection and helped us to understand how to develop it. The Brakhage Center was built for just this sort of work and we will discuss the strategies behind its creation. Ultimately, we will present our own thoughts on strategies for developing collections embedded within scholarship and the curriculum.; “Expanded Libraries: Managing Experimental Media Collections by Creating New Workflows” by Rice Majors, University of Colorado Boulder
The Vasulka archives present a substantial problem in preservation, digitization, and interpretation, since their art needs contextualization with the “art machines” they created and an understanding of the hardware that underlies the content. Furthermore, the archive contains over 300 linear feet including nearly 2000 hours of video on a huge variety of (often obsolete) formats, technical manuals for repairing equipment, multiple generations of customized art machines, obsolete hardware customized for production, and more traditional manuscript and printed components. Incorporating such a large collection into the campus digital archive presented substantial challenges, political and technological. This paper describes how digitization was managed and the best practices for ingesting such a collection. Crucially, the normal separation of metadata provision from digitization from preservation from archival processing wouldn’t work, so we explore the development of new workflows. We describe the processes of digitization from obsolete media, provision of tape-level and other metadata, and storing the many hours of footage."
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Keywords
2012 RBMS Preconference, Short Papers