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Public Media NDSR
- 1. NDSR NYPR Life in a Public Media Archive
- 3. Before NDSR
- 4. Photo Credit: Mary Kidd
- 5. Digital Preservation Roadmap Report Assessments: Collection, Metadata, Storage Best recommendations Image courtesy of the NYPR Archives
- 6. Images courtesy of New York Public Radio Archives from WNYC’s “Al Tropea” collection of images
- 8. Image courtesy of New York Public Radio Archives from WNYC’s “Al Tropea” collection of images
- 10. Photo Credit: Mary Kidd
- 11. The NDSR-NY 2015/16 Cohort
Editor's Notes
- Hi everyone, I want to thank the AAPB, WGBH and Rebecca and Casey for having me here today. My name is Mary Kidd, and I am a National Digital Stewardship Resident working at the New York Public Radio (NYPR) archive.
- So, what is NYPR? They say it best on their website: “New York Public Radio is home to three of the country’s leading public radio stations – WNYC FM, WNYC AM and WQXR FM – as well as New Jersey Public Radio and The Jerome L. Greene Performance Space. WNYC is a major producer of original content for public radio nationwide. WQXR is New York City’s only all-classical music station. New Jersey Public Radio covers the issues that matter in the garden state and extends New York Public Radio’s news, talk and cultural programming deeper into New Jersey. The Greene Space is a street-front broadcast studio and live venue where audiences can experience our programming in person and online.”
- A little bit about myself and what I was doing up until I became an NDS resident. I got my Master’s degree in Library Science from the Palmer School at Long Island University in October 2014. While getting my Master’s I was also working full-time at JSTOR, a digital archive of scholarly journals. Near the end of my time as a graduate student, I started interning evenings and weekends at a recording and restoration studio called The Magic Shop, where I got some hands-on experience cataloging and transferring reel-to-reels, cassette tapes and discs. Once I graduated, I knew I wanted to transition from academic publishing to audio archiving. When I saw that NDSR had picked NYPR as one of their host institutions, I said to myself, Okay, Mary. You have GOT to go for this! So I made an application video going over some of my professional experiences. When I got my NDSR acceptance letter in May, I was pretty ecstatic. I left my full-time job at JSTOR to take this opportunity, which was a big transition for me. I knew ultimately that NDSR was one of those once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to get hands-on experience in a field where that sort of thing is highly valued. So, I went for it.
- WNYC has a huge analog legacy archive, with items that are both on-site at their office on Varick Street here in New York, as well as in off-site storage in New Jersey. The archive was founded by Andy Lanset in 2000. The archive provides a central repository for thousands of audio recordings, photographs, memorabilia, reports, news items, program guides, institutional records, and promotional materials. Among its holdings are more than 50,000 recordings in a variety of formats, from early lacquer and acetate discs, to reel-to-reel tapes, to digital audio tapes and compact discs. The photo you see above was snapped by me a few days ago. Underneath the WNYC banner is my coworker Anna, wearing headphones and probably editing a WAV file she just transferred in ProTools from a reel or disc. She, along with my other coworker Ben, are working on an NEH grant project transferring and digitizing over 700 hours of audio on reels and lacquer discs. The archive has 3 full-time staff - one of whom is on sabbatical - and a revolving staff of people like me and Anna, working on temporary archival projects.
- For my NDSR project, I am working on developing a final report called the “Digital Preservation Roadmap”. The goal of this report is to provide NYPR with a detailed investigation of the current landscape of the organization’s digital collections and formulate recommendations for long-term, institution-wide digital curation policies. Their goal is to lay out a trajectory leading to a seamless and integrated approach that will leverage in-house resources, but also think of new and creative ways to capture the digital history and legacy of NYPR. The report will consist of three main assessments. There will be a collection assessment, which will describe the current state of digital production throughout the stations. This part of the report will describe what file formats are being created, who is creating these files, and quantifying how many files are being created and their file size. There will be a metadata assessment, to help the archives pinpoint what data is being generated by the station’s various software production systems, but also in what format the information is encapsulated (XML, text, RSS, .xls) There will also be a digital storage assessment that tracks the lifecycle of a digital object, from its creation on a networked SAN, to its storage on a station NAS, to its eventual life as a streaming access copy. Putting all of these things together, I will conclude with a series of best recommendations for the archive for both the short- and long-term.
- One thing I have learned while working at a radio station is that radio is changing. If you are an archivist working in a media archive, it’s important to keep in mind that there are two essential components to any broadcast: a recorded component, and a delivery component. Before shows were recorded digitally, various formats were used to record full-length shows, sound clips and effects, promos, and underwriting. These things were kept on shelves and played out on air, or re-incorporated into a new broadcast. NYPR’s archive has shelves of this sort of stuff. In the 1990s through to the early 2000s, CDs were used to rebroadcast shows. Before that, there were reels and cartridges. Now, things are different. All shows are recorded digitally. And in addition to that, not only are these files played out “on air”, they are also distributed digitally. A good example of this is a podcast. You can either wait for the podcast to playout during a timeslot on air, or you can download it from iTunes or a show website onto your smartphone and listen to it wherever, as many times as you like. The good thing about digital recording technology is that you’re no longer filling up shelves with stuff. In place of this are servers holding hundreds of thousands of files, and file quantity and size are growing at an exponential rate.
- In addition to this, the stations are outputting what I like to call supplementary, non-audio digital formats like video, Tweets, scanned high-res images, and crowd-sourced maps. Parallel to how the definition of radio is encompassing digital recording and distribution models, the idea of NYPR’s “legacy” is also evolving to include these sorts of supplementary items, too. The archive is beginning to look at the new ways sound is being recorded and broadcast, and its supplementary media, very closely. They have already implemented some systems, like a PBCore-backed database called CAVAFY that internal staff can use to search the archive’s physical and digital holdings. But, they are looking to enhance their services to the stations. They want to increase discoverability and access. They also want to make sure it’s safe for years to come. And they want the archive to be a dynamic service that not only safeguards the past but informs current news and storytelling.
- One way I am accomplishing this sort of information-gathering work is conducting interviews of staff, transcribing those interviews, and using them to create documentation that narrates how things work between departments and shows. The interviews are sometimes surprising. For example, a video producer I was talking to told me that she has a huge folder on her desktop of animated gifs that her department posts on the WNYC Facebook page. So then I had to ask myself: do animated gifs constitute part of NYPR’s digital legacy? One thing to keep in mind when working in a media archive: you are embedded in a live production environment. You have producers that are trying to push out current event reporting, or new ways of telling stories, and trying to grow their listenership. Inevitably, they’re going to ride some social media trends so that they don’t alienate their listenership, and also so they captivate and expand audiences. This means animated gifs in 2015. What will NYPR use in 2017, or 5 or 10 years from now? Ultimately, I know that my report is not called the “Animated Gif Roadmap Report”. Although, I do want to suggest ways that the archive can implement strategies and systems that are flexible enough to accommodate a wide range of digital and social media outputs.
- In addition to interviews, I also submitted an internal survey out to NYPR staff, to gather both quantitative and qualitative data about systems usage across staff and departments, and provide additional interview leads. The image you see here is a wonderful favor that my watercolorist friend from Toronto did for me: she painted of a WNYC tape that I am offering up as incentive to inspire people to take my survey. One lucky survey-taker will win it. So far, over 70 people have taken the survey, so obviously incentives work! In building this survey in Google Docs, I reached out to folks in NYPR’s User Experience group, as well as a UX person that my NDSR program administrator, Margo, connected me with, who works for Metro (which, like AAPB, is the organization administering NDSR-NY). Both UX people reviewed my survey and gave me advice on better ways to clean it up and structure it. This experience has given me experience performing this sort of UX-y type activity that I can add to my growing skillset. NYPR has been incredibly helpful, overall. And you come to realize that people in departments like Engineering and IT, or certain producers like to talk shop about archives.
- Speaking of building up skillsets, One of things NDSR residents are required to do is dedicate 20% of their time learning about things outside of their project. This can be anything from taking an online course, to organizing a field trip for the whole cohort. One of the things I decided I wanted to do for my 20% was to learn the ins and outs of ripping CDs to make preservation copies, understanding the various errors that can happen, and the science behind error correction. John, my mentor at NYPR, is quite the expert on this topic and has written about it for journals and blogs and hosted workshops demonstrating how he goes about doing this. This past week, John and I have been using a special CD ripping drive called a Plextor to analyze and rip CD-Rs recorded of the Brian Lehrer Show in the early 2000s. In addition to this, the archive employs a “Ripstation”, which is this funky machine with an arm that automatically picks up and drops CDs on and off the CD drive tray. This way, you can actually rip 100 CDs at a time. The first disk we put in - an early 2000s recording of a Brian Lehrer broadcast - had an incredible amount of errors: so many that it actually took 8 hours to rip because the drive had to slow down to a snail’s pace to properly collect the bitstream. There was no reason why this CD, of all the CDs in this particular box which were all the same brand and recorded around the same time, failed. So, in encountering this CD, I have learned a lot about how CDs are just so incredibly volatile. Interestingly enough, however, when I played the CD back, the sound was fine: there weren’t any drop-outs. So that opens up a whole other line of questios. Also, shortly into burning a stack of CDs, the Ripstation hard drive itself just failed for no reason. (maybe because Mercury is in retrograde). It started making this awful clicking sound. Watching things break - which they do, all the time - and observing how the archivist interacts with IT and responds to failure, has been an incredible learning experience for me.
- I want to end with the cliche saying, “You will not be alone”. Going from learning about digital archiving in a classroom to a “real world” situation is tricky. Media preservation and radio preservation are relatively new fields of study. There are best archival practices for sound archives, but these don’t necessarily speak to archives embedded in live production environments. So, if you’re here listening in on this webinar, and you’re planning on applying: know that, working in a media archive is fun and exciting but it’s also stepping into the so-called “great unknown”. You’re not going to have a textbook to reference every time something goes wrong. Sometimes you don’t even know what “wrong” means. But that is okay, and if anything, you will be the ones driving the field into unknown territory, turning over new stones, and learning a lot. Here is a picture of myself and the four other women in my cohort. I lean a lot on my cohort, and other cohorts present and past. We work together on a lot of things, from editing each other's’ blog posts, to planning field trips or symposiums, practicing public speaking, asking each other for suggestions for resources, or just throwing around ideas. I can only imagine that the AAPB cohort next year will be composed of a similarly talented, enthusiastic and helpful group of individuals, each with different skillsets and strengths that compliment one another.
- So, good luck on your applications. Of course, please feel free to contact me later on if something comes to mind. Thanks for listening! I’ll open up the floor to anyone who has any questions.