IASA's 55th Annual Conference

In a time of budget constraints across heritage projects worldwide, the preservation of sound collections is becoming an increasing challenge, especially for archives without existing digitisation solutions.

At the same time, advances in technology present opportunities to deviate from ‘traditional’ digitisation systems – the hardware and software commonly associated with audio production and preservation.

In response to this changing economic and technological environment, we have been investigating the potential of a low-cost and versatile solution for audio digitisation using the Raspberry Pi single-board computer.

We will share our findings about the viability, capability and utility of a low-cost, ARM Linux-based audio digitisation workstation to enable archives to achieve preservation-standard transfers without the overheads of a typical desktop computer system.

➺ Building Digital Preservation Capabilities: The DPC Competency Framework and Audit Toolkit
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Sarah Middleton (Workshop/Tutorial)
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The preservation of digital materials is not a static activity. To create an enduring archive of digital content requires constant advocacy effort and partnership to proactively manage the organizational and technological infrastructures we deploy - particularly in times of crisis, when resources are so stretched.

Applying a carefully considered approach to continuous improvement of digital preservation capabilities can greatly benefit practitioners when looking to set and achieve objectives, sharing and embedding this responsibility across whole organizations. This workshop aims to provide attendees with the skills and tools to develop and implement a methodology for continuous improvement at their organization.

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) has created resources to facilitate this process. The newest resource is the DPC Competency Framework with accompanying audit toolkit (DPC CAT) and example role descriptions.

The workshop will begin by providing attendees with an understanding of the importance and benefits of a continuous improvement approach to benchmarking their digital preservation capabilities. Following this, attendees will be provided with an introduction to the Competency Framework, before being guided through a practical exercise allowing them to audit their own digital preservation skills using DPC CAT. The workshop will finish with an overview of other DPC resources that can help practitioners with planning and advocating for their digital preservation activities.

This workshop will benefit individuals and organizations from across many sectors who wish to assess their current digital preservation capabilities and plan for future developments.

➺ Managing Collections with Audiovisual Metadata Tools
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Rebecca Fraimow (Workshop/Tutorial)
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As audiovisual content and formats become increasingly complex, the need to capture descriptive and technical metadata about audiovisual assets becomes ever-more pressing – and while asset management systems may come and go, the metadata contained in those systems shouldn’t disappear with them. This half-day workshop will focus on capturing accurate, standardized metadata that can be mapped and migrated between different systems using the PBCore schema.

Beginning with an introduction to key concepts in audiovisual metadata and a walk-through of the structure of the PBCore schema, the workshop will provide hands-on exercises in audiovisual cataloging using the PBCore Cataloging Tool to create XML records and MediaInfo to capture technical metadata about digital files. Attendees will learn about best practices for controlled vocabularies and standardized data fields, be presented with real-world use cases for PBCore records, and practice conceptual metadata mapping into databases.

Although the workshop will be presented in English, tools and resources will also be available in Spanish thanks to the NEH-funded PBCore Education and Training Project.

The 'Sound Safari' workshop is designed to offer a hands-on exploration of multimodal models and their applications in cataloging, information retrieval, and Artificial Intelligence. It enables attendees to delve into avant-garde AI-based technologies that convert images into both sound and textual descriptions. Through physical exploration and practical engagement, our goal is to nurture a deep-seated analysis of the consequences of these technologies, the emerging narratives they weave, spotlighting biases and the hurdles posed by non-standard images, and their ramifications for the automated cataloging of archives.

Furthermore, this workshop is dedicated to uncovering the wealth of interdisciplinary collaboration. It invites participants from diverse fields to contribute with their distinct viewpoints, thereby enriching the discourse and widening our collective insight into AI's significance within the realm of archival science.

Structured to be highly interactive, the workshop is divided into three parts: an introductory overview of multimodal models and their practical uses; a fieldwork excursion, wherein participants will walk around the conference environment to capture images, which they will then convert into sound, text and images again via AI models; culminating in a time for sharing and discussing the insights and outcomes derived from these activities.

To ensure participants can fully engage in the workshop, they are kindly asked to bring their laptops.

➺ Using AI to make spoken-word content more accessible and discoverable
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Mark Boas (Workshop)
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Generative AI coupled with more traditional AI such as Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) present unique opportunities for the categorisation, discoverability, accessibility and dissemination of spoken word media. In this workshop Mark Boas, CTO of TheirStory and co-founder of the Hyperaudio Project will discuss and demonstrate methods of exposing media in a form that facilitates search, sharing and even remixing using the open source tools he has been involved in developing for the last decade. The last 12 months has seen a sea change in the emergence of generative AI such as LLMs (Large Language Models), at the same time we’ve seen speech-to-text algorithms improve in accuracy and speed, while costs continue to fall.

His work at TheirStory, focussing on stories from underrepresented and marginalised communities, seeks to combine word-timed machine generated interactive transcripts with emerging generative AI to create metadata that facilitates the surfacing of content and its re-use in formats by students and other communities .

Believing that these technologies should be able to be leveraged by the wider community, much of this work adheres to open standards and has been released under open source licenses in forms that can be mixed, matched and integrated into other platforms.

Mark will take us on a whistle-stop tour of these new innovative technologies, explaining the concepts behind them – the pros and cons of each and inviting participants to try them out. Touching on the ethics of AI he’ll talk about the wider aim of engaging the oral-history archival community and fostering collaboration around open technologies to help expose this important aspect of our history.

We welcome all IASA members to join us for a presentation on the process of becoming a member of the TC.
The officers share the historical basis for the process, some weaknesses and flaws we've identified, and a process for developing solutions for a more robust and transparent process.
Following a formal presentation there will be a discussion seeking input from the IASA community.

This session consists of 3 presentations and a joint Q&A with the presenters. The session contains:

➺ Ann Hardy - Unlocking an Audio-Visual Television News Archive (Long presentation)

➺ Karen Cariani - Amplifying diverse stories to a variety of audiences and users (Long presentation)

➺ Mamotshabo Johanna Boloka - Challenges associated with access to audiovisual documents for visually impaired users in South African archives. (Short presentation)


**Abstracts:**


➺ Unlocking an Audio-Visual Television News Archive
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Ann Hardy (Long presentation)
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The paper shares experiences and strategies undertaken at the University of Newcastle to enable staff and students to search the NBN Television Archive via ‘Whizzard’ - a world first video content discovery and playlist solution to search Television news content. A collaboration between university Library, IT Services and Linius to create a search tool to unlock historic audio-visual archive. Unlike other video products with playlist-based experiences, this search tool provides access to News content from 1982 to 1995. Users are in complete control of their viewing experience, enabling them to deep-dive into videos and identify 'moments' relevant to their search, which are then stitched together into compilation videos to watch and share. This pilot project unlocking a television archive and sharing the social lives of people in the Hunter region, giving users unbridled opportunity to curate relevant content into playlists that can be shared or saved for future use.

➺ Amplifying diverse stories to a variety of audiences and users
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Karen Cariani (Long presentation)
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The American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) preserves American public television and radio and provides access to the American public on the AAPB website. With over 160,000 files representing the geographic, cultural and social diversity of the American public, the AAPB provides an invaluable resource for educators, journalists, scholars, filmmakers, and the inquisitive general public.

This rich and complex array of content presents equally complex archival challenges. In managing the needs of its different user and contributor communities, the AAPB must navigate the complexities of managing metadata at scale, the technological challenges of providing different levels of virtual access, and, of course, numerous copyright constraints. Although much of the content can be streamed from the website, more than half the collection can only be viewed onsite at the Library of Congress or GBH, with limited exceptions for time-bounded scholarly usage. Nonetheless, despite these limitations AAPB content is having a concrete impact on scholarship, filmmaking, science research, education, and more.

This presentation will provide examples of how various different communities are making use of AAPB content, uncovering little known stories and voices, and discuss the AAPB’s strategies for dealing with its access limitations and reaching a wide array of users.


➺ Challenges associated with access to audiovisual documents for visually impaired users in South African archives.
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Mamotshabo Johanna Boloka (Short presentation)
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Access to information in archives and any other information centre is crucial for every citizen including the visually impaired people. This qualitative study reports on challenges associated with access to audiovisual materials in South African archives by the visually impaired citizens. Through semi-structured interviews, data was collected from the selected archivists in South Africa. The collected qualitative data was presented and analysed thematically. Findings indicate that South African archives do not cater for visually impaired users. It was found that due to financial constraints emanating from budget cuts by the South African government, all materials in the archives are not user friendly for the visually impaired users. This study recommends that the South African government provides funding to ensure access to visually impaired users.

➺ Copyright Fair Use/Dealing: A brief global overview
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Allison Schein, Ilse Assmann , Perla Olivia Rodriguez, Shubha Chaudhuri (Panel session)
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Globally, some form of fair dealing or fair use governs how those who care for, manage, license, and allow a range of uses. Understanding the complexities of one country only sometimes translates to another. In this panel presentation, we aim to provide a review of the copyright law fair use or fair dealing in India, Africa, South America, Spain, and the United States so that members of our community will leave knowing the foundations of each country's laws. Ilse Assmann, Perla Olivia Roddriguez, Shubha Chaudhuri, and Allison Schein will address each of their country’s fair use or fair dealing laws, and a robust Q and A will follow.

This session consists of 4 presentations and a joint Q&A with the presenters. The session contains:

➺ Benjamin Amakye-Boateng - The Impact of Political Insecurity on Archival Access and Preservation: A Case Study of Bokoor Studios. (Long presentation)

➺ Ana Masiello - Audio preservation strategies in Latin America: Sustainable approaches adapted to our reality. (Short presentation)

➺ Simon Rogers, Curtis Sassur - Own your own sound: Imagining a DIY post-custodial archival network (Short presentation)

➺ Nurul Huda Abdullah - Decoding Malaysia's Audiovisual Archives in Creating National Unity (Short presentation)


**Abstracts:**


➺ The Impact of Political Insecurity on Archival Access and Preservation: A Case Study of Bokoor Studios.
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Benjamin Amakye-Boateng (Long presentation)
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Archives and cultural heritage institutions frequently face a perilous landscape as a result of political instability. This research investigates the impact of such disruption on the activities of Bokoor Studios, Ghana's pioneering archive committed to the preservation of African music history. The study focuses on how political upheaval and changes in government have impacted access to and preservation of the unique treasures held within Bokoor Studios. Drawing on historical data, interviews with key stakeholders, and archival record analysis, this study reveals the challenges posed by political instability, such as funding disruptions, threats to physical infrastructure, and an increased risk of censorship or loss of culturally significant materials. The instance of Bokoor Studios exemplifies the several ways in which political unrest can hinder the archiving process, ranging from logistical challenges to the more sinister prospect of cultural oblivion. Furthermore, the study delves into the tactics used by Bokoor Studios to address these issues, emphasising the importance of resilience, adaptability, and worldwide solidarity. Finally, the purpose of this study is to contribute to the larger discussion on the preservation of cultural archives in politically vulnerable contexts, by providing insights and tactics that might be used by similar institutions around the world. Through the perspective of Bokoor Studios, we acquire a better appreciation of the essential role that archives play in preserving cultural continuity and memory during times of political change.

➺ Audio preservation strategies in Latin America: Sustainable approaches adapted to our reality.
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Ana Masiello (Short presentation)
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Those involved in audio preservation in countries like Argentina are accustomed to working in crisis contexts and developing preservation strategies that consider the complex social, political, and economic landscape of Latin America. Particularly, the economic factor often plays a significant role in our decision-making processes.

International standards typically recommend storage conditions and materials for enclosures that are beyond our financial means or not readily available locally. As a result, we must employ creativity and research to develop alternative strategies that involve "adapting" materials originally intended for other purposes for conservation enclosures, or reusing and readapting original enclosure systems. Additionally, it is crucial to prioritize preservation strategies that are feasible for the institutions responsible for them.

In this way, our "sustainability" stems from the necessity and the belief that it is possible to develop sound preservation practices in our unique realities, which differ from others and must be addressed accordingly, always with the aim of preserving our sound heritage. In this presentation, I will share some of our experiences, both successful and unsuccessful, in developing these "non-ideal alternative preservation practices" in sound preservation. These strategies are tailored to the realities of Latin America and may prove beneficial to colleagues and institutions in the region and worldwide.

➺ Own your own sound: Imagining a DIY post-custodial archival network
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Simon Rogers, Curtis Sassur (Short presentation)
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Founded in 2020, The Toronto Information Network for Independent [TINI] Music Co-op has been slowly building capacity to support DIY archival documentation of the Toronto independent music community. Following on the collaborative research experience of building an outreach initiative, working with prototype archival projects in four identified constituencies (artists, venues, fans and archivists), and supervising a user experience [UX] design student working group project at the Faculty of Information in the University of Toronto, TINI co-founder and archivist Simon Rogers will present a talk on community documentation and building supports for a post-custodial archival program in the nonprofit sector. The short paper will focus on early project initial steps and the power of harnessing existing resources to build cheap and slow effective capacity to support the long term organization of community records in conjunction with pre-existing communities of practice. He will argue that letting go of traditional ownership models, in particular, can stimulate social innovation. He will also outline an academic support role for harnessing the strength of traditional archival practices without threatening loss of artistic agency or engagement because of perceived threats to ownership or autonomy through institutionalized archival collecting practices. This paper will examine the utility of post-custodial, multi-institutional metadata creation in building a dispersed archival network, with a low-barrier to access, especially in the long term preservation of digitized content and fragmentary analog materials with multiple creators such as zines, merchandise and concert ephemera.

➺ Decoding Malaysia's Audiovisual Archives in Creating National Unity
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Nurul Huda Abdullah (Short presentation)
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“Decoding Malaysia's Audiovisual Archives in Creating National Unity” refers to the process of understanding and interpreting audiovisual archives to foster a sense of national unity. This involves preserving and making accessible historical and cultural materials that are significant to a nation’s identity. Audiovisual archives, such as those managed by the National Archives of Malaysia (NAM), play a crucial role in this process. They preserve valuable materials like documentaries, films, commercials, and corporate video animations that capture various national historical events. These archives are seen as a shared resource, encouraging co-ownership and donations to complete the collection for future generations. However, despite its importance, the field of audiovisual archives often goes unnoticed and is overlooked by certain communities. Therefore, efforts are made to improve preservation practices, engage the younger generation, and expand community involvement through outreach programs. In essence, decoding these archives involves understanding their content and significance, and leveraging them as tools to unite communities. They serve as information hubs for analysing cultural, historical, and educational aspects, developing common ground across communities, and aiding in the preservation of cultural heritage.

Meeting agenda:

1. Welcome
2. Brief update on our joint project with the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) - a Universal Discographic Database (UDD)
3. Greetings/update from the ARSC discography committee
4. Introductions and sharing of work – attendees will have an opportunity to report on their work with databases, research or other discography-related topics (please prepare 5-minutes each, if you would like to participate).
5. Other news/updates

➺ Queering the Archive
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Rosie Rowe, Katherine C’Ailceta, Laura Batitucci, Dagmar Brunow (Panel session)
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Please join us for the first-ever “Queering the Archive” panel in IASA’s 55-year history, featuring speakers
Katherine C’Ailceta: Connecting Queer Collections in Aotearoa New Zealand: An overview of archiving organisations holding queer AV records in Aotearoa New Zealand
Dagmar Brunow: Lost in Collaboration? Countering the risks around queer archival ethics of care
Laura Batitucci: Focusing on the Queer Super-8 films Digitized by the Digitalização Viajante (Traveling Digitization) Project in Brazil
Rosie Rowe: Found in the news clips: Bunch and Bjorgum—Iowa’s  first unsuccessful attempt at legalizing gay marriage

This session consists of 2 presentations and a joint Q&A with the presenters. The session contains:

➺ Henrik Smith-Sivertsen, Katrine Hofmann Gasser - Re-writing Danish music history via free sound search (Long presentation)

➺ Carolyn Birdsall - Activating Histories of AV-Collections: From Enriched Metadata to Community Engagement (Short presentation)


**Abstracts:**


➺ Re-writing Danish music history via free sound search
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Henrik Smith-Sivertsen, Katrine Hofmann Gasser (Long presentation)
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Since the advent of the Internet mid 1990’s, free text search has been a central tool. First via indexes of online webpages in readable formats, then all sorts of digitized materials made searchable via OCR. However, written sources are by definition secondary sources, not least in relation to media archives. In this paper, we will demonstrate how the use of free sound search has been instrumental in two recent research projects on Danish music history, conducted at the Royal Danish Library.

The base is the tool xcorrSound. Via indexing of sound archives, it is possible to match sound files and perform searches into big amounts of data. Via a custom-built interface, the results are delivered in tables with relevant data, including a direct link to the file in the media archive and a custom-built media player, directly executing the files.

In this case, we used it to identify the use of specific songs in Danish radio and television from 1989 to 2020, indexed across the Danish media collections. From the data we could not only map airplay of specific songs year by year within minutes, but also analyze the contexts to a much higher degree than before. For instance, how a specific track was introduced or how the reception of a given song changes over time.

The tool has changed generally dark archives into vivid and rich resources for re-telling Danish media history. For now, the searches are performed track by track, but the perspectives of AI implementations are evident.


➺ Activating Histories of AV-Collections: From Enriched Metadata to Community Engagement
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Carolyn Birdsall (Short presentation)
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This presentation investigates the potential for better contextualising past histories of audiovisual (AV) collections in institutional metadata and explores possibilities for increased community engagement and knowledge co-creation. It will reflect on the process and results of the recent research project TRACE (Tracking Radio Archival Collections in Europe, 1930-1960) to consider further future pathways for integrating contextual information about the historical impact of war, conflict and political change (e.g. before and after World War II) on AV collections.
Drawing from the TRACE project framework that identified how AV archives have been subject to major disruptions and damage (e.g. to physical carriers/content, archival documentation, broadcast buildings/storage spaces, and continuities of staff/knowledge), this talk will take up several short examples to explore the extent to which historical insights can be gleaned from existing metadata.

This session consists of 2 presentations and a joint Q&A with the presenters. The session contains:

➺ Casey McNamara, Brianna Toth - Surfing the Ocean of Metadata with MediaConch to Meet the Needs of Many (Long presentation)

➺ Morgan Morel, Dave Rice, Charles Hosale - Updating Open Source AV Preservation Tools to Better Serve the Preservation Community (Short presentation)


**Abstracts:**


➺ Surfing the Ocean of Metadata with MediaConch to Meet the Needs of Many
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Casey McNamara, Brianna Toth (Long presentation)
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The Audio and Moving Image Preservation (AMIP) department of the New York Public Library and the Smithsonian’s Audiovisual Media Preservation Initiative (AVMPI) are both centralized preservation units that serve multiple curatorial branches of large, publicly funded research institutions. Both are undertaking mass digitization of heterogeneous collections of audiovisual materials for preservation and access, and both have a digitization output of thousands of files per year, using a combination of in-house labs and external vendor services. Quality Control procedures play an important role in both institutions' workflows, and, at this scale, automation of QC is essential. This presentation looks at how these two institutions make use of MediaArea's open source tool MediaConch to ensure specification conformance for their digital assets. In the case of NYPL AMIP, MediaConch has been part of the QC toolkit for several years, but new efforts are being made to refine its use with the aid of Python scripting. The case of AVMPI, as a relatively new initiative, MediaConch has been beneficial to develop quality control policies in tandem with (rather than in reaction to) digitization procedures. The presenters will share how they have collaborated with one another to develop their individual policies, touch on the learning curves they experienced using new digital tools, rigidity vs. permissiveness in standards, and their hopes and dreams for the future of QC.

➺ Updating Open Source AV Preservation Tools to Better Serve the Preservation Community
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Morgan Morel, Dave Rice, Charles Hosale (Short presentation)
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FADGI (Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative) has a longstanding partnership with developers within the audiovisual (AV) community, aimed at refining and advancing open-source tools essential for practitioners. In 2024, FADGI collaborated closely with developers Dave Rice and Jérôme Martinez to extend the functionality of key tools such as FFmpeg, vrecord, and BWF MetaEdit. This presentation offers an overview of the latest enhancements implemented in these applications, highlighting the underlying needs identified within both the US federal community and the broader AV preservation domain that drove their prioritization. Additionally, it delves into the collaborative processes employed, including the utilization of GitHub for project tracking and the crucial role of user testing conducted by community members and stakeholders.