Fall 2007, Week 3

The biggest development for week three was the discovery of the artists’ contracts forms from the ATN collection. When Jaime Davidovich, President of the Artists’ Television Network transferred the collection to the University of Iowa, we assumed the rights that ATN held. When artists signed the contracts they agreed to allow ATN to use up to three-minute excerpts of the videos for promotion of ATN activities. This has largely been the discovery that will define the scope of the digital ATN collection.

The ATN digital collection will be a database of these three-minute clips, presumably of all noteworthy content, if not the entire collection. This will serve as advertisement of the physical collection that will be accessible to professors for course material (and maybe students?) as well as researchers from outside the University. In the future if need be we will work to gain full reproduction rights from artists so we may put their entire videos online/ Because the collection has gone relatively unknown for so long, gearing up the collection for use requires some preservation work.

The project now includes reformatting the entire collection from ¾ inch U-Matic tapes both DVCam, for a preservation copy, and to DVD, as an access copy. The three-minute clips will be pulled from the DVCam’s. As a part of this preservation effort, I will also be building the first ever catalog of the some 426 plus tapes. Sid Huttner, Head of Special Collections, believes the most effective way to do this will be to serialize the tapes (001U-Matic, 001MDVCam, 001DVD, etc) and to condense the shorter clips onto as few tapes as possible. The locations will then also need to be indexed by time code. It’s a lot of work, but I’m excited to get the collection functioning as it should.

The 426 plus tapes range in duration from two minutes to 60 minutes. To ease the pain of this arduous digitization process, it has been suggest that I take advantage of the Information Arcade’s Graduate Assistant, having her do the bulk of the transfer once the process is running smoothly.

Early in the week Nicki Saylor (DLS), Mark Anderson (DLS), Pam Kacena (Media Services), Lisa Martincik (Infor Arcade), and I met to discuss equipment use. We concluded I could use Media Services old U-Matic deck for as long as I wanted and could use the Info Arcade’s DVCam decks and Final Cut Pro workstations for the transfer. On Friday I set up to begin the reformatting process.

The U-Matic deck from Media Services was scary-old. I put the tape in pushed play and nothing happened. I then turned the machine off and on and got the tape to play. I ejected the tape, re-inserted it and it stopped working. So I took the machine upstairs, took of the top and freaked out… the master tape was engaged in all of the machines mechanisms! After a couple of hours of performing surgery on the machine I got the tape out WITHOUT DAMAGING IT! So after some pleas of desperation, it looks like the library will buy me (the library) a newer deck for the reformatting. That process is on hold for a bit.

Next week I meet with Jennifer Wolf, DLS Metadata Librarian, to discuss metadata issues for the ATN collection. I will also meet with Nancy Kraft, Preservation, Sid Huttner, Special Collection, and the DLS staff to nail down the Project Plan.