Fall 2007, Week 4

Turkey Day all week. On Monday I worked out a rough metadata scheme with Jennifer Wolfe, DLS Metadata Librarian. Video art hasn't seen much metadata so a standard approach wasn't there to feed off. It was a lot of new information to absorb. For a second I felt I much have too much on my plate. Early in the week I was apprehensive about having to physically reformat the video, learn metadata standards/vocab, catalog an entire collection existing in multiple formats, design an interface, and become reasonably proficient with ContentDM, MIME, HTML (maybe XML too), CSS, LCTGM, and video compression. By the end of the week, however, my brain had bent and I had a better grip on it all.

Wednesday the 19th I had a meeting with Preservation, Special Collections, and Digital Library Services to discuss everyone’s roles and needs as a way to nail down the scope of the digital ATN collection. My conclusion that making the online collection of clips to serve as an advertisement for the physical collection was shot down. I guess I had lost site of the difference between an online exhibit and an online collection. Instead I will begin by building a boutique collection with full-length videos and clips. This will build the foundation from which we move to a full-access digital collection. We discussed how there definitely are opportunities for full-length videos at this early juncture especially the work from the donor and work from Hans Breder who was professor of Intermedia at the time and did some work with ATN. The idea being that if we build a model of full-length videos and clips, it would be easier to get other artists to permit reproduction for use in the digital collection.

Other things we discussed were uncompressed digital master video files, getting a GA to create DVD access copies, developing a workflow (especially with the folks in the Info Arcade), coming up with a final count of actual U-Matic tapes needing reformatting, Dublin Core vs PB Core for metadata, and the actual real transfer time. Nancy Kraft reaffirmed that from a preservation standpoint, going to DVCam as a master instead purely digital was the more sound approach. She also emphasized that U-Matics was way too unstable for the reformatting not to be a priority.

Speaking of U-Matics… the library was all set to go ahead and purchase an newer U-Matic deck, but we were visited by a tape deck goblin who repaired our deck. Bob Burns, engineer in the Cinema and Comparative Lit department said we’d have problems with any U-Matic deck we bought. So to avoid risking potential damage to the ATN artifacts, reformatting is a biggie. Next week I have more metadata schoolin’ with Jen Wolfe, will finish my project plan, will develop a workflow for DVD access copy production, and will start reformatting the U-Matics to DVcam. This last activity also entails creating instructions for the GA’s that will eventually take over this part of the project.