Text of presentation delivered at AMIA 2015 -- Molly Rose Steed

1. Welcome to EXTRA: Examining AV Enterprise at a Regional Academic Archive. My
name is Molly Rose Steed, and I am the head of the moving image and sound archive
in the Special Collections Division of the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott
Library. This presentation is a case study of a grant we pursued and received to
digitize a local television newsmagazine and what Special Collections and library
staff learned about funding, implementing, and sustaining AV digitization projects. I
have two colleagues with me today to talk about the grant and its implications:
Jessica Breiman is an archivist in the moving image and sound archive where she
uses her background in library science to make our collections more accessible and
integrate them into the library’s discovery systems. Starting this summer, she has
just taken on the role of liaison to the Marriott Library’s digital library for all of
Special Collections.
Jessica is going to talk about selecting a grant project and obtaining funding, then I
will speak about the results of our grant and the work we have done so far to make
the resulting files accessible. Then finally, joining us by Skype, we have Tawnya
Keller, who will discuss digital preservation.
Tawnya has a background in audiovisual archiving. After working as the head of the
moving image and sound archive in Special Collections, Tawnya moved to Library IT
to develop the Marriott Library’s digital preservation program, which involves not
only taking care of only audio-visual materials but also dealing with all other digital
items produced and collected by Special Collections and the rest of the library.
Before we move on to Jessica’s presentation, I’ll give a little background on our
archive and the EXTRA project.

2. Our hope is that experiences we present today will help those of you who work with
small, regional or academic archives as you start to tackle some of the challenges
that stand between you and the access and preservation of your unique and exciting
collections. To give you some idea of how we compare as an institution, Jessica put
together some numbers about the library’s budget and staff. Although the
University of Utah is a fairly large institution with over 30,000 students and the AV
Archive has over 50,000 items, note that our archive staff is still very small.
The AV Archive is the smallest of seven departments Special Collections. Most of
our collections grew out of Manuscript and Photograph collections, with the earliest
document AV accession in 1971. In 2001, the library hired Tawnya as its first full
time moving image and sound archivist.
By the time Tawnya was hired, the AV Archive already had a significant processing
backlog. Then, in 2005, the collection more than doubled in size with the accession
of the archive of KUTV News. And, as you can see, it has continued to grow at an
ever increasing rate.

3. This case study focuses on a tiny portion of that giant KUTV collection, the television
newsmagazine, EXTRA. As we undertook this first grant funded video digitization
project, we learned things about our processes, our archive and our institution that
will influence and improve the way we deal with the digital preservation and access
of the remainder of our archive.
Until this year, AV digitization at the Marriott Library had been focused almost
completely on granting rapid access to materials as they were requested by donors
and patrons. We had with a small in-house digitization setup that allowed us to
provide access to several formats. We created access copies on optical discs, and
focused almost all of our staff time on transferring our collections so that they could
be used by students, other researchers, filmmakers, and donors. This rapid
turnaround provided basic access to thousands of items. However, we did not have
the technical staff or sophisticated equipment required to create preservation grade
digital masters or deal with deteriorating items.

4. For example, on the left you see one of the EXTRA tapes when we tried to digitize it
in house. And on the right you see the result when we sent it to an actual lab.
EXTRA ran from 1977-1984 and was recorded for broadcast on ¾” U-matic
videocassettes, some of which are on their last legs. It’s a fascinating program that
straddles broadcast journalism and independent film and launched careers in both
fields, coinciding with the rise of the Sundance Film Festival, which first opened as
the Utah/US Film Festival in 1978. It contains a unique mesh of critical exposés,
short subject documentaries, experimental video, and in-depth interviews with local
oddballs, Utah politicians, and national personalities from Robert Redford and
George Romero to Timothy Leary and Harvey Milk. All in all, it provides a historical
snapshot of art and culture during a time of marked social change and technological
development in Utah and throughout the nation.
And now for some clips, beginning with Lucky Severson’s original introduction in
1977.
[play clip]
And now Jessica Breiman is going to discuss the project selection and funding
process.

5. Now that Jessica’ shown you what we asked for, here is what we actually happened:
While the basic elements of the project were funded, we received nothing to help
make the newly digitized items accessible or promote their use, so we had to adjust
our expectations for the grant. This is what we have accomplished so far:

6. We contracted with The Media Preserve for the digitization of the EXTRA
showtapes, but even this part of the project didn’t go exactly as planned. We
originally sent 137 U-matic videocassettes, some of which had 1 episode per tape,
some 2.
But, because of the age and condition of the tapes, 14 of them were too damaged to
use. Fortunately, KUTV had dubbed a number of episodes onto other formats, so we
were able to recover all but one of the episodes that failed by sending in 19 2-inch
and 7 1-inch open reel tapes.
This experience really brought home the need and timeliness of this project - the
tapes were in even worse shape than we had hoped. It also taught us how lucky we
were to be working with a collection that contained duplicate items.
But we hadn’t planned for digitization failure in our original project outline, so we
were forced to divert money from digital preservation to cover the cost of digitizing
26 open reel tapes when we had planned on 14 videocassettes. If we are lucky
enough to conduct another project with a collection of deteriorating items where
duplicates are available, we will know to be ready with our contingency plans, and
include them in our project outline and our grant budget.

7. Once we received the digital files, we uploaded them to a server with limited access
and robust tape backups.
As you can see, even though we only digitized 163 tapes, the data produced was
over 11 TB. We worked directly with Tawnya in Digital Preservation to upload the
files to our server.
Next, we performed selective quality assessment using QCTools. This is where the
funds we weren’t awarded started to affect the project, and the process began to
slow down.

8. Because we had no dedicated staff member for this grant, quality assessment
proved even more time consuming than we anticipated. This work was divvied up
between myself and two part timers, who documented their assessment using a
shared Google Doc that would allow us to work simultaneously. Simultaneous
editing was especially important since everybody working on this project had their
time divided between this and other digitization, processing, reference, and
administrative tasks. The Marriott Library currently uses Microsoft Sharepoint for
file sharing, but it does not allow users to work simultaneously on a single
document, and, we discovered, if you access it on a Mac, it does not tell you if
somebody else is editing the document. After a few instances where work we
thought we’d saved disappeared because someone else had opened the document
first, we transferred to data to Google Docs and started saving a periodic backup to
Sharepoint instead.
In QCTools, we identified image anomalies and visually compared the trouble spots
with the digitizing technician’s notes. We found that although some of the images
were less than flawless, all the problems could be traced back to analog
imperfections in the tapes that had been noted by the technician during the
digitization process.

9. Even when the final images had major flaws, they still showed significant
improvement over what we had been able to produce in house. After checking
approximately 50% of the items, including samples from all of the formats we
submitted, we felt confident enough to sign off on the quality of the deliverables and
move on to the access and metadata portion of the project.
As you can see, metadata creation, EAD encoding, and streaming derivative creation
are all still in progress.
This is the same content slide I showed a minute ago, except without the data
generated, which I removed because I want to emphasize the deceptive size of this
project in terms of necessary metadata. Not only did those 163 tapes produce over
11 TB of data, they also contain 637 individual newsmagazine stories, all of which
needed to be separated for access, and all of which required individual metadata in
order to make them truly useful to our patrons.

10. At the beginning of the project we already had some basic metadata from a show log
provided by some of the original producers and a basic inventory of the KUTV
collection overall. Some titles like “Ed Abbey” and “Miss Utah Pageant” and fairly
self explanatory, but others, like “Computers” are vague. To make the collection
useful to researchers, brief but detailed descriptions of the segments needed to be
created.
Again, I collaborated with our part time employees to create mp4 access files for
each story that will eventually be streamed in our online digital library and to enter
descriptive metadata about the content of each story. In our Google Doc, lines in
green have already been inputted into our in-progress EAD finding aid, while lines
in yellow still need to be encoded. Derivative creation and metadata is
approximately 60% complete.
Once we have our access files and metadata ready, the files will be uploaded to a
streaming server and represented in the University of Utah’s digital library. At this
stage, the greatest impediment to access will be the copyright situation of the
videos.
Even though the KUTV collection was donated in 2005, an official agreement
between the station and the University was not finalized for several years. That
agreement allows for educational use, and we have a good relationship with station
archivists and producers regarding non-commercial use of the collection. However,
it is unclear whether that can extend to widespread online publication of this
content, and, partly because of the difficulties they have had solidifying agreements
in the past, library administrators have been reluctant to support a meeting to
discuss the issue, at least until the project is complete.

11. However, this does not mean the collection isn’t accessible. Already, patrons can
access materials in the Special Collections reading room - which is accessible to the
public - if they call ahead with a reference question. In this case, we would create a
DVD access copy of the story in question. Eventually, we hope to provide greatly
enhanced access to digital collections with messy copyright situations by installing
an access station in the reading room where patrons can view rights restricted
items.
Once all the metadata and derivatives are ready, however, our educational use
agreement with KUTV will allow us to make it accessible online from all University
of Utah computers, and we hope to work with KUTV and library administrators to
expand accessibility from there.
When we officially launch the collection, we plan to actively promote its use by
anybody who can visit University of Utah campus. Already the KUTV News
collection is the most used in our archive, but, as Jessica hinted at, the AV Archive is
relatively mysterious even within the library and underutilized on campus. EXTRA
will give Special Collections an excellent opportunity to further integrate with the
rest of the University of Utah community and encourage students and faculty to use
AV materials for academic research in a broad range of subjects.
Even though the final phases of the project have been pushed back, we are still
excited to achieve our goals, and we can feel satisfied that the most important part
of the project - the part that was actually funded - is complete. This content, stored
on deteriorating magnetic tape, may now survive for a new generation of users.
And now Tawnya will join us via Skype to discuss digital preservation at the U and
how it has been affected by this grant.