Less Waiting, More Do-ing: Dispatch from No Time to Wait! 7
Are you interested in using and supporting open-source solutions, ensuring the preservation of audiovisual heritage, and solving shared preservation challenges? You’re in luck because No Time to Wait! (NTTW!) delivers on all the above — and more!
On the NTTW! website, the focus of the conference is described as follows:
- developing collaborative initiatives to preserve media
- efforts to extend capabilities and opportunities within archives
- active open media standardization projects
- seeking consensus in audiovisual preservation strategy
- examination of open media use in film and video digitization
- integration of open source tools into archival workflow
- examples of cross-community collaboration and skill-sharing
- developments in open media
NTTW! is an incredibly welcoming and knowledgeable community of individuals from a range of backgrounds and levels of expertise working to preserve AV heritage as well as content on other dynamic formats.
NTTW! 7 took place between November 7–10 at the Kino NFA Ponrepo (part of the Národní filmový archiv of Czechia) in Prague and virtually.
This blogpost highlights the importance of NTTW! as well as draws attention to a few themes and topics from NTTW! 7. And check out the full programme as well as the collaborative notes to find out more about this year’s talks!
Collaboration was one big theme at NTTW7. Brianna Toth, Siobhan Hagan, Dan Hockstein from Smithsonian Libraries and Archives spoke about the Audiovisual Media Preservation Initiative. It was really inspiring to see how their work positively impacted their colleagues across the many areas of the Smithsonian; for those working elsewhere, the AVMPI website includes helpful resources and links to GitHub repositories with additional resources for supporting the preservation of AV formats.
Nick Krabbenhoeft of the New York Public Library spoke about using PRONOM and DROID, both developed by the UK National Archives, to identity file formats and route files to the appropriate ingest workflow; however, some files might not match the PRONOM format profile, meaning that further file format research needs to be undertaken. Nick also encouraged AV specialists to help improve and update PRONOM. Check out the PRONOM_Research GitHub repository to learn how to get involved!
Somaya Langley of the Science Museum Group reminded attendees of the IASA TC 07 Guidelines for the Preservation of Born Digital Video that is still open for comment.
Communication and knowledge sharing were other strong themes this year.
Jannecke Van Dalen presented about a joint initiative between the Austrian Film Museum and the Slovenian Cinematheque to bring together thirteen AV archiving institutions to create a set of methods and strategies to pass on knowledge within AV archives. This work has also culminated in the publication Share That Knowledge! A Road Map for Sharing Knowledge across Generations of Audiovisual Archivists that will be launched later in November.
Joanna White shared her knowledge and expertise of creating scripts to manage and preserve AV collection materials at the British Film Institute, which can be found on the BFI Data and Digital Preservation GitHub repository.
Sarah Gentile from the Museum of Modern Art spoke about community adoption of open-source tools as well as how preservationists can help.
Leontien Talboom and I were fortunate to speak about some of the work happening within the Digital Preservation team at Cambridge University Libraries.
Leontien’s presentation focused on transferring collection content from optical discs and challenges encountered, including disc rot and not being able to tell whether any data had actually been written to a disc. Along with creating this workflow and carrying out QC of problematic discs, Leontien also wrote a guide to help users understand the workflow. Leontien and I are also working with colleagues in the Libraries’ Digital Content Unit to see whether multispectral and microscopic technologies could help detect and diagnose issues with discs.
Leontien’s presentation wasn’t the only one focused on optical carriers. Morgan Stricot and Ralph Michel gave joint presentations on their work at Zentrum für Kunst und Medien to preserve and make accessible Yuppie Ghetto with a Watchdog, a time-based media artwork created on laserdisc whose content — a barking dog — becomes increasingly agitated as the viewer moves closer to the screen. Morgan openly shared her experience of engaging and navigating conversations with external communities to ask question to help preserve this work, something that many preservationists either have already or will have to do at some point in their careers, especially when trying to preserve content on older formats.
At the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Chialin Chou and Blake McDowell spoke about transferring and processing content from camera cards deposited with the museum, as well as working with Dave Rice to create a script to concatenate video files, re-wrap files using the .mkv container, and embed desired metadata.
I presented on a proposal of how to preserve and make accessible Minecraft Cambridge, which was deposited to CUL’s Covid-19 collection. I’m really interested in the concept of Minimum Viable Preservation and whether it could be expanded to apply to the OAIS functional area of Preservation Planning. Minecraft Cambridge is one of the most (if not THE most) complex digital item within CUL collections and thinking through its preservation and access has prompted questions around technical, user, and legal requirements.
It was nice to hear about someone else grappling with the challenges of videogame preservation: Jonáš Svatoš from Národní filmový archiv spoke about a project to preserve Czech videogames and videogame heritage. If you’re interested in this topic, the project is planning an event at the Kino Ponrepo in November 2024.
Another highlight of attending NTTW! is hearing updates to tools commonly used within the AV and digital preservation communities.
The Library of Congress is currently carrying out two projects. Software Accessibility for Open Source Digital Preservation Applications (presented by Kate Murray of the LoC and Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative and Joan Hua of AVP) focuses on “broadly applicable recommendations on accessibility best practices for open-source software,” using embARC, BWF MetaEdit, and Handbrake as case studies.
The second project — presented by Charles Hosale and Genevieve Havemeyer-King of LoC and Seth Anderson of AV P— focuses on evaluating Bagger and the BagIt software.
There are also recent updates to both MediaConch and MediaInfo, all of which can be found in Jérôme Martinez’s slides.
And also news of FADGI support for FFMPEG, including enhanced support for FFV1 and timecode as well as FFV1 being upgraded from acceptable to preferred in the 2023–2024 Recommended Formats Statement.
On behalf on the CUL Digital Preservation Programme, Leontien and I wish to thank the NTTW! Organising Committee (Dave Rice, Valeria Dávila, Alessandra Luciano, and Jérôme Martinez) as well as Adela Kudlova of the Národní filmový archiv for their time and effort to make #NTTW7 possible!
If you’d like to support the important work of the NTTW! community, contact the Organising Committee.
