This document summarizes the efforts of the Occupy Wall Street Archives Working Group to archive digital media from the Occupy Wall Street movement. It describes their process of collecting livestreamed footage and other digital files, assessing content, planning digital preservation workflows, using Omeka as an access platform, and collaborating with other archival partners like the Internet Archive. The group has collected around 500 gigabytes of data so far but faces challenges around metadata, storage, and sustainability that will require ongoing work and partnerships.

1. Archiving Occupy:
Livestreamed Video and more
.

2. Occupy Wall Street: The first 5 months
September 17, 2011 – The first day of the OWS gathering in
Zuccotti Park. An estimated 1,000 people attend on the first day.
October 5th, 2011 – an international day of action results in
many highly reported arrests.
November 15, 2011 – NYPD evicts occupiers from Zuccotti Park.
December 17, 2011 – On the three-month anniversary of the
protests, organizers of the protest called for a "reoccupation."
January, 2012 – A series of smaller protests attempt to
unsuccessfully reoccupy Zuccotti Park.

3. What is Activist Archivists?
2. Concerned with
licensing, longevity, metadata, security, and public
accessibility of moving image content generated in the
activist sphere.

4. www.activist-archivist.org

5. What is Global Revolution TV?

6. What is Global Revolution TV?
• Largely streams footage related to Occupy Wall Street
since September 17th, 2011, but hosts and trains
activist livestreamers in other parts of the world

7. What is Global Revolution TV?
• Primarily uses Livestream software, a web-based
broadcasting application that allows
livestreaming, editing, mixing from different sources of
video.

8. The Project

9. FIGMENT as precedent

10. Suits for Wall Street:
Subversive Business Outfits as Tactical Camouflage

11. Disclaimer about the term
“digital preservation workflow”

12. Digital archives project planning
• User interviews
• Assessment of needs and our goals
• Project plan
• Staffing/roles
• Tool selection (ongoing)
• Collaboration with creators
• Collaboration with advisors

13. STEP 1: figure out where the files are going to come from
(what to collect?)

14. STEP 2: set goals, policies and establish workflow elements
(standards, systems, partnerships, redundancy)

15. STEP 3: establish who is creating good stuff, and who
can help with the archiving efforts

16. STEP 4: get data, preliminary ingest processes (get files into
secure storage with access system w/ workable UI)

17. STEP 5: assign metadata/catalog (get database to talk to
interface for cataloging)

18. Could be asking users to fill this in

19. This is what it would look like and from where we
could export as a CSV and bring into Omeka

20. STEP 6: Resolve “technical difficulties” as much as
possible & promote access to assets

21. STEP 7: Consider prospects for
migration, normalization, future
emulation, redundant storage

22. STEP 8: long term stewardship?

23. Archives working group’s informal
work with the Internet Archive
Sent over 200 links to websites to harvest
De-prioritized initial research interest
Immediate access to collection is helpful
Email suggestions to graham@archive.org

24. Archive-It.Org

25. The decision to not have orphan works
It would be very easy to end up with a lot of
orphan works
The working group approved my proposal that
we only collect CC licensed work
There is no ‘OWS philosophy’ on licensing or
problem with ‘exclusivity’ per se, we just didn’t
want a ton of orphan content.

26. Creative Commons Licensing

27. Omeka
Free, open source, flexible, extensible
Initiative of George Mason University/Roy
Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media
PHP with useful plug ins
Anticipated assessments, then compose feature
requests to programmers in Tech Ops or others
who know PHP and want to help

28. Omeka test on Amazon S3

29. Mini-DV collection assessment

30. Content
Livestreamed footage from the November
15th, 2012 raid on Zuccotti Park.
High quality recordings of the early days of the
movement before Mini-DV became “obsolete.”

31. Scope & Risks
Incomplete metadata.
Poor storage in an already poor environment.
No backup or system for access.

32. Recommendations
Hold community archiving events for volunteers
to re-label tapes, enter metadata into a
database, and capture material to a digital file.
Upload access copies to the Internet Archive
for universal access with complete metadata.

33. What’s the archives working group been
doing with digital materials?

34. Sharing and collecting digital files
at Share Day at Eyebeam
Collaboration with artist in residence at
Eyebeam, Taeyoon Choi (Speakers Corners)
Opportunity to share finished or works in
progress with the audience and/or the OWS
Archives Working Group
The event was a lot of fun

42. http://owsarchives.wordpress.com/why-archive-ows/

43. At a Crossroads
Test servers and plug ins have shown us a lot
About 500 gigabytes of data
Possible collaboration with activist owned
tech company pending funds to pull own
weight in thecollective (membership model?)

45. Some lessons learned
R-E-S-P-E-C-T your creators and colleagues
Talk to people who know the context
Have a plan
Make imperfect decisions instead of none
Keep notes

46. Thank You!
Kelly Haydon | krhaydon@gmail.com
Activist Archivists