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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.