Glenstone Roundtable: November 4, 2016
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Slides related to a brief talk discussing open source versus proprietary in the analog and digital space.
![Open-source software (OSS) is
computer software with its source code
made available with a license in which the
copyright holder provides the rights to
study, change, and distribute the software
[...] Open-source software may be
developed in a collaborative public manner.
source: wikipedia](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
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Glenstone Roundtable: November 4, 2016
- 1. Open source & media conservation Lauren Sorensen Glenstone Roundtable November 5, 2016
- 2. Open-source software (OSS) is computer software with its source code made available with a license in which the copyright holder provides the rights to study, change, and distribute the software [...] Open-source software may be developed in a collaborative public manner. source: wikipedia
- 3. analog video umatic vhs hi-8 source: Museum of Obsolete Media
- 4. open source software is used all over, in production & preservation hack day projects (AMIA & DLF) bagit archivematica ffmpeg imagemagick hydra project resourcespace
Editor's Notes
- My background is in audiovisual archiving and digital preservation of independent media and digital media held in museums and archives ---- and now I have just started in the last two months working on turning towards a research focus, and one of my main interests is in analysis of proprietary media in the archives and museums and the larger cultural implications that holds. I’m going to spare you the academic talking that goes along with that - but I want to frame the discussion in my talk around my experience that might speak to some of our collective experiences with open source software and some of what I see as the antecedents to it. I want to shout out some folks in the beginning here who are eloquent writers about this topic including: Misty DeMeo, Dave Rice, Ashley Blewer, Erwin Verbuggen. So one of the great things is that people in the field, not just in academia do research and publish their research, so there’s a lot going on on all fronts.
- I’m going to frame this, from Steven’s suggestion on my own experience working between analog and digital media preservation. My own story with open source comes from working with analog film and analog video --- then digitization workflows and digital preservation at Bay Area Video Coalition and then for a project at the Library of Congress. I owe a lot to my colleagues, including dave rice, ashley blewer, kara van malssen and a whole slew of other collaborators that would take too much time to mention. I learned a lot at each of these positions, but I think articulating what it meant for technology to be open and code to be available and community to be involved were the big takeaways and big part of what i’ve brought with me . What is open source? [read slide] --- depending on the license you might say have code that has an apache license attachd to it or a public domain designation. These in themselves have different idiosyncracies but basically mean that the code can be accessed and used by those who have some expertise or want to acquire some expertise in a coding language. Counter to that, proprietary software are all the applications that archivists and media conservators love to hate: you might remember microsoft wordperfect, appleworks, and so on. The source code for these applications is owned by the company who produced it, and although many times can be reverse engineered in some manner, it requires the collaboration of a perhaps defunct company -- or a company who wouldn’t want to collaborate with an archive. Since cultural heritage institutions are thinking about the “long game” this can throw a serious wrench into our work
- And so, we have analog video --- and we can really see I think this thread between proprietary analog media and proprietary digital files, software codebases hidden away. all of the formats listed on the slide, obsolete videotape that no longer have playback machines manufactueed have a similar paradigm from what we talked about before in discussing obsolescing file formats. So then we can turn to open source software and think again about the distinction between proprietary software -- I cannot even begin to imagine what open source hardware for a umatic deck would look like but this really is what open source software developers are building right now --- they are coming up with JUST THAT -- an equivalent that we can use right now to play back files and that digital preservationists can return to . ways of reading and preserving digital files that don’t require a particular manufacturer to keep producing those playback decks -- or in this case playback software.
- A well known site among programmers called Github is where a lot of collaboration takes place in the open source community,, and entities such as Library of Congress, MoMA and others have adopted it as a way to share all sorts of things: actual software applications but also collections data for digital humanists to mine. When you contribute back to these projects you’re contributing to this larger culture and community that can benefit -- e.g. independent media makers and artists who want to pursue their own work on small budgets, when these free applications are developed can then do so. [[run through software]]