Going Far by Going Together: Collaboration with Scholars and Other Allies
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Presentation by Casey Davis Kaufman at the 2018 Association of Moving Image Archivists Conference.
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Going Far by Going Together: Collaboration with Scholars and Other Allies
- 1. Going far by going together: Collaboration with Scholars & Other Allies Casey Davis Kaufman Associate Director, WGBH Media Library and Archives Project Manager, American Archive of Public Broadcasting
- 2. a collaboration between the Library of Congress and WGBH Coordinating a national effort to preserve at-risk public media before its content is lost to posterity and provide a centralized web portal for access to the unique programming aired by public media over the past 70+ years
- 3. Be a focal point for discoverability of historical public media content; Coordinate a national effort to preserve and make accessible historical public media content Provide content creators with standards and best practices, guidance, training, and advice for storing, processing, preserving, and making accessible their historical content, and for raising funds in order to accomplish these tasks; Disseminate content widely by facilitating the use of archival public media content by scholars, educators, students, journalists, media producers, researchers, and the public, for the purpose of learning, informing, and teaching; Increase public awareness of the significance of historical public media and the need to preserve and make accessible significant public broadcasting programs; and Ensure the perpetuation of the archive by working toward financial sustainability. Mission
- 5. âGet to know your fire department.â -Professor Elizabeth H. Dow
- 6. Why Collaborate? ⢠Because of a shared responsibility ⢠To share expertise and perspective ⢠To pool financial and human resources ⢠To speed up solutions ⢠To increase funding opportunities ⢠To gain greater credibility ⢠To answer research questions ⢠To make new friends ď
- 7. Benefits of Collaboration ⢠Collaboration promotes self-analysis ⢠It results in problem-solving ⢠It makes you look at the bigger picture ⢠It teaches ⢠It helps to accomplish things you never would have been able to do alone
- 9. within our WGBH AAPB team Karen Cariani, Director Casey Davis Kaufman, Team Manager & PM Sadie Roosa, Metadata & Dev Manager Rebecca Fraimow, DigiPres & PM Henry Neels, Developer Peter Higgins, Archives Manager Ryn Marchese, Engagement Jason Corum, Developer Drew Myers, Senior Dev Kevin Carter, Sys Admin
- 10. with the Library of Congress partners ⢠LOC Responsibilities ⢠Preservation ⢠WGBH Responsibilities ⢠Access ⢠Outreach ⢠Metadata ⢠Shared Responsibilities âOverall governance âPolicy âCollection development âIngest âRights decisions
- 11. with content creators/donors ⢠They need AAPB ⢠As a preservation repository ⢠For grant-writing support ⢠As an access portal ⢠As advisors ⢠AAPB needs them ⢠To buy in to participation ⢠To build a comprehensive collection ⢠To build our credibility ⢠Challenges ⢠Many different workflows ⢠Many different types of organizations with different levels of resources ⢠Similar goal but also selfish goals
- 12. with advisory committees ⢠In 2017, AAPB created three new advisory committees ⢠Scholar Advisory Committee ⢠Education Advisory Committee ⢠Stations and Producers Advisory Committee ⢠The Committees meet quarterly, helping us set priorities and goals. They also: ⢠Are folks we can regularly turn to to bounce ideas ⢠Incorporate AAPB into their work (research, teaching, etc.) ⢠Provide letters of support ⢠Review conference proposals ⢠Propose and serve on conference panels ⢠Provide new outreach opportunities for us (such as through their blogs or publications) ⢠Help us make new connections ⢠Promote us to their networks, including on social media ⢠We are also guided by our Executive Advisory Council, with a focus on sustainability, fundraising, and long-term strategy.
- 13. with scholars through curation of exhibits ⢠AAPB regularly engages with scholars and graduate students through the curation of digital exhibits. ⢠AAPB provides project management support and trains curators on Github (where we manage exhibit content) and Markdown/HTML. ⢠Curators provide their subject expertise. ⢠We also turn to scholars to serve as peer reviewers for our curated exhibits.
- 14. with digital humanities scholars ⢠AAPB has engaged in collaboration with digital humanities scholars. University of Texas at Austinâs HiPSTAS project is one such example ⢠We provided AAPB transcripts and media as a data set for research into audio soundwave analysis ⢠To further support digital humanities research, weâve created new policies: ⢠AAPB Transcripts Research Access (TRA) ⢠AAPB Media as a Dataset Research Access (MaaDRA) ⢠TRA â scholars agree to Rules of Use and obtain credentials to access AAPBâs Transcripts API ⢠MaaDRA â scholars agree to Rules of Use, pay a small processing and storage fee, and obtain copies of AAPB proxy files for non-consumptive research purposes ⢠In return, we ask for scholars to provide any metadata generated through their research back to AAPB and consult with us on use of the data to enhance access.
- 15. with media studies scholars ⢠AAPB has collaborated with media studies scholars (namely, Dartmouth Collegeâs Media Ecology Project). ⢠Piloting an effort to provide access to AAPB content through Dartmouthâs MediaThread platform and Semantic Annotation Tool. ⢠Students and researchers will create annotations, which will be provided back to AAPB to improve access to the collection.
- 16. with computational linguistics scholars ⢠AAPB is collaborating with computational linguistics scholars and students to build the CLAMS platform â âComputational Linguistics for Archival Materialsâ ⢠We are providing AAPB transcripts and media as a needed data set for researchers ⢠They are using the collection to improve their own tools and workflows for computational analysis. ⢠Forced alignment of transcripts ⢠Scene identification ⢠Language recognition ⢠Speech-to-text ⢠Image recognition ⢠Named entity recognition ⢠OCR text on screen ⢠AAPB receives needed metadata to improve access to the collection.
- 17. with engineering schools ⢠WGBH recently collaborated with Olin College of Engineering to create an âArchives Over the Airâ exhibit ⢠Students had the chance to work with archival television content to learn about analog broadcast technology ⢠We worked with them to create a vintage living room exhibit featuring a low-signal broadcast of historic programming from our collection to three analog televisions
- 18. with public and academic librarians ⢠Public and academic librarians are key to building awareness and use of your collections! ⢠AAPB has sought opportunities to engage with librarians who then have the knowledge and information they need to share our collection as a resource with their constituencies. ⢠Exhibiting at conferences (Public Library Association) ⢠Providing webinars to local academic librarian consortium ⢠Creating a Library Communications Toolkit which includes information such as: ⢠What to include in a LibGuide featuring AAPB ⢠How to embed AAPB content ⢠How to use our API ⢠Boilerplate language ⢠Information about exhibits and collections
- 19. with legal counsel & Berkman Klein Center ⢠Since 2014, weâve worked closely with legal counsel at WGBH, Library of Congress, and Berkman Klein Center to develop access policies for the AAPB ⢠AAPB team benefits from improved access to collection, gaining better understanding of copyright law and fair use ⢠WGBH benefits from collaboration with the nationâs library ⢠LOC benefits from provisions in copyright law for public broadcasters ⢠Berkman Center benefits by providing law students with legal experience ⢠Students conduct research into big picture questions such as the risks of geographic access expansion of our Online Reading Room ⢠They also perform fair use analyses of âyellow-litâ items that require further review before we can post them online. ⢠See here for our âNavigating Copyrightâ slides from last year! ⢠http://bit.ly/2zqoWcw
- 20. with LIS programs ⢠AAPB collaborated with Simmons University GSLIS to conduct scientific usability tests of AAPB website and FIX IT game ⢠AAPB benefits from usability reports and recommendations ⢠Students benefit by getting hands-on experience with AV digital library websites ⢠Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellowship collaborations ⢠AAPB gets to preserve and make accessible collections from currently underrepresented regions and communities ⢠Graduate students will get paid positions at public broadcasting stations, getting hands-on AV digitization training ⢠Stations will get a body and digitized collections submitted to AAPB ⢠LIS programs get digitization equipment and documentation for sustaining AV curriculum
- 21. with digitization service providers ⢠We consider all of our digitization projects a collaboration with our digitization service providers. ⢠But this year, in particular, we have launched the Transcribe to Digitize Challenge with the generous support of George Blood. ⢠George is providing free digitization services for public media stations that are able to correct an equivalent number of transcripts on our crowdsourcing platforms. ⢠We benefit by receiving copies of digitized content in the AAPB. ⢠Stations benefit through the community engagement opportunities and preservation this project offers. ⢠George benefits from the promotional opportunities and recognition of his brand.
- 22. with lifelong learners ⢠We are beginning a collaboration with a local senior center to provide programming for their lifelong learners ⢠We will give presentation and provide content for screenings ⢠The seniors will engage with our content and contribute to our crowdsourcing platform, FIX IT+, by correcting transcripts of content in the collection.
- 23. with our marketing team ⢠Weâre able to provide historical knowledge and content to marketing team to promote WGBH and AAPB on social media ⢠We benefit from their connections and expertise in press relations, social media, messaging, and outreach
- 24. with our events team ⢠We are beginning a collaboration with our events team to organize an archival screening series. ⢠The events team benefits by from the content and institutional history we can provide. ⢠We benefit from the promotional opportunities the series offers.
- 25. with technical dev partners ⢠AAPB, Indiana University, and AVP are completing a project to extend Avalon ⢠We share developer resources and time to build shared, open code ⢠We benefit from the expertise of each organizationâs developers and project managers ⢠Together weâre more successful at getting grants to support this work
- 26. Dedicated Outreach & Engagement Staff ⢠In 2017, we hired an Engagement and Use Manager. ⢠Having someone dedicated fully to outreach has been transformative.
- 29. Final words ⢠Find common goals ⢠Recognize whatâs in and out of scope for your org ⢠Plan projects with ample time to accomplish them ⢠Respect and appreciate expertise and talent ⢠Appreciate differences and learn from them ⢠Know that failure happens, and itâs OK ⢠Document, document, document! ⢠Patience ⢠Look people in the eye ⢠Leave your ego at home ⢠Compromise
- 30. Cin cin! Salute!
Editor's Notes
- Thanks so much Laura for organizing this session and to my fellow panelists for your inspiring talks! Today Iâm going to talk about collaboration and share some exmaples of the types of organizations weâve collaborated with at WGBH and the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. I know this session is about collaboration with scholars so Iâm going to talk about that but also take it a bit further and mention some other allies weâve worked with and whom yuou might be able to work with in your own community that I think are relevant and have all enriched our work at WGBH.
- Itâs a collection of radio and tv materials created by or for public tv and radio in the US dating back to the 1950âs to be preserved for historical purposes and for access by the public.
- The American Archive of Public Broadcasting seeks to preserve and make accessible significant historical content created by public media, and to coordinate a national effort to save at-risk public media before its content is lost to posterity. Our mission and goals are challenging. In addition to preserving, we want to assure discoverability, and access. We want to guide and support current content creators and stewards of the materials with best practices to protect this historic programming. We want to facilitate the use of the materials and increase public awareness of itâs importance. And of course we want to be able to sustain these goals into the future. We recognize that we can better achieve this mission through collaboration!
- Back in grad school one of my professors always said âget to know your fire departmentâ when you become an archivist. If a disaster happens in your community, you want your fire department to know the value of the materials preserved in your archive and you want them to think of you during the first response. I take this suggestion even further though. Get to know everyone in your community, in your organization â who might help you achieve your mission. At first it may not be obvious. I never thought that a group of aspiring engineers would help us pull of one off one of the most successful outreach campaigns in my time at WGBH (more about that later). If you think creatively and consider the expertise around you, you can make those connections, get them excited about the archive you manage, and go farther than you ever would alone.
- âWhen a group of people work together toward achieving a common goal or mutual benefitsâ To begin, you have to buy into the benefits of collaborating â share resources, build on each others successes, share expertise. Itâs important to build trust among partners especially if you are helping each other on projects. Face to face meetings are the best way to build that relationship. And everyone likes new friends! Donât be afraid! Collaborations â they will enrich you and drive you crazy, just like friends.
- Challenges people to think, articulate and receive clarity about their competencies. It serves as a mirror and gives them a glimpse of strengths and weaknesses. When you pool your talent, it creates a talent pool that is vast and more competent, able and experienced. When you collaborate, you become a learning organization, youâre essentially teaching new things to each other. You become an org that encourages a culture of continuous learning and supports that learning through new opportunities for growth and developments.
- You may have read this 2008 report from OCLC titled âBeyond the Silos of the LAMs: Collaboration among Libraries, Archives and Museums.â In this report was published this figure titled âThe Collaboration Continuum.â In this figure, collaborative activities take place along a continuum. As LAMs moves left to right on this continuum, the collaborative endeavor becomes more complex, the investment of effort becomes more significant, and the risks increase accordingly. However, the rewards also become greater, moving from singular âone-offâ projects to programs that can transform the services and functions of an organization. The continuum begins with âContact,â then advances to âCooperation,â âCoordination,â âCollaboration,â and finally âConvergence.â This continuum has been helpful for me in better understanding the collaborative efforts that we pursue for the AAPB, and the expectations, requirements, and benefits of such efforts.
- Our team consists of administrators, project managers, archivists, developers, analysts, business development managers, and marketing/outreach staff. We all come from different backgrounds and value each otherâs expertise. The success of our team collaboration is owed to our director, Karen Cariani, who demonstrates collaborative behavior within our team and externally at every level. Our team interacts with each other in an open, communicative, friendly environment. We recorgnize each personâs strengths and find ways to learn from each other, continue our professional growth, and gain new skills by working together. We engage all team members early in the process of project development, and weâve found that this helps us better plan project timelines, workflows, and come closer to a more accurate budget estimate. We also ensure that all team members are kept up to date with other projects that theyâre not involved in, as well as keep the team informed of big picture efforts to sustain our initiative and move it forward. Communication within our team is key to success, and we balance face-to-face meetings with emails and more informal communication such as hipchat.
- For a national level collaboration such as the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, trust and partnership is also very important. WGBH is dependent on the Library of Congress to make this initiative work. We could not take on the preservation of all the digital files. Likewise, the Library benefits from WGBHâs contacts with stations and the public media community and experience with making media materials accessible. Similarly WGBH can apply for grants that the Library cannot, and through our collaboration we have received grants that support positions at the Library of Congress to continue our work. WGBH is one of the biggest public media powerhouses within the public media community, but sometimes that causes a lack of trust among smaller stations. Working with the Library of Congress, this has helped to build our credibility as an archive. And among our âcore teamâ of administrators at WGBH and the Library, we each have strengths and weaknesses that complement each other. As collaborators of an initiative that is also coordinating many other entities across the country, we need to trust each other and be in agreement about what we want to accomplish and how to move forward. We also need to be able to act independently when we see it benefits the project. We are two institutions that have other agendas and priorities, move at different paces, and have different concerns. It can slow a project down, but we can also learn from each other. We can particularly learn patience! Face to face meetings are harder and more infrequent, although we can take advantage of various meetings and conferences to get together, most communication is over the phone or via e-mail, which we all know can sometimes lead to misunderstandings and mistrust. Itsâ much easier to trust someone who is standing in front of you, than to trust a voice over a black box. Looking someone in the eye, face to face is very powerful connection, and you canât do it with an e-mail, or skype.
- I also consider the AAPB to not only be a collaboration with the Library of Congress but also with all the potential contributors. Which adds another layer of complexity. As we try to preserve materials from across the country, there are some organizations that just canât figure out the first step. Some need lots of help, others just need a little nudge and a word of encouragement. It is easier as a national aggregator to have everything done by a central hub, but then you have a bottle neck and it all takes longer. So coordinating many activities, not under direct control, can be tricky and the results frustrating. And how do you figure out best copies across the country, so you donât duplicate efforts? Itâs the right thing to do, but that can make you crazy. One example is our NET catalog project. The goal is to build a national catalog of titles and then figure out who has best copy. But if institution A has money to digitize itâs entire collection, but best copy of some titles exist at institution B what do you do? Sharing the money is hard, and the whole project becomes more complicated and will take longer. Institution A just wants to preserve itâs collection as is. Institution B has a hard time raising money to preserve itâs best copiesâŚ... Similar goals to preseve the material, but selfish because they want their copy preserved. Thatâs not bad, its just confusing and a complicated decisions to make.
- We also set up adivory committees, including a scholar, education, and stations and producers advisory committee. It takes some staff time to coordinate the groups, but each group has a set of co-chairs who help move action items forward. We recognize that we donât have all the answers to questions and having guidance from experts in the primary fields for which our project aims to connect with has been incredibly helpful to us. The committees are folks we regularly turn to for ideas, they serve on conference panels with us, they review proposals, write letters of support, and promote our work to their networks.
- One way in which we have engaged with scholars is through the curation of digital exhibits. I see this as a mutually beneficial â the scholars have an outlet to publish on their subject expertise for a general public audience, and they gain new skills in doing so. We manage our exhibits in GitHub and each scholar gets trained on Github 101, Markdown and HTML. We benefit from their content expertise that allows us to improve access to our collection. Also as part of curated exhibit process, the scholars make recommendations about specific titles related to their research that may not be digitized yet, and we then become aware of them, are often able to locate a copy and get permission to digitize the content and make it available.
- Weâve also engaged with digital humanities scholars. One of our pilot efforts was a collaboration with UT Austinâs HipStas program (Tanya Clement) where her group analyzed content from our collection to create speaker labels. Weâre still in the process of figuring out how best to continue this work â we know itâs very time consuming to train machines to recognize voices, and itâs something we canât do alone. But as a result of this work, we recognized there are opporutnities to work with digital humanities scholars in other domains. We created policies⌠and in returnâŚ
- Talk about Rynâs position
- Talk about Rynâs position
- Talk about Rynâs position
- Talk about Rynâs position
- Talk about Rynâs position
- Talk about Rynâs position
- Talk about Rynâs position
- Talk about Rynâs position
- Talk about Rynâs position
- One of the few things I remember from science class in junior high and high school is the concept of symbiosis. A mutualistic relationship is when two organisms of different species "work together," each benefiting from the relationship. The bee and the flower. Bees fly from flower to flower gathering nectar, which they make into food, benefiting the bees. When they land in a flower, the bees get some pollen on their hairy bodies, and when they land in the next flower, some of the pollen from the first one rubs off, pollinating* the plant. This benefits the plants. In this mutualistic relationship, the bees get to eat, and the flowering plants get to reproduce. So I say letâs be like the bees seek out mutually symbiotic and beneficial collaborations! If you want to talk more about bees, Karen Cariani is here in the room!
- Itâs important to find common goals otherwise why are you working together? Respect each others strengths â both personally and institutional. Appreciate the differences and learn from them. It isnât the technical work flow that ends up being problematic, but the complexity of working with many different people. Everyone works at a different speed, everyone speaks at a different pace.
- And for the corny finale - Leave your ego at the door, look people in the eye, be very patient, and raise a glass to your new partnership.