The Shipping Manager will be responsible for handling, packing, and receiving materials
to and from clients, some of which may be very fragile (ie, LPs, films, etc). They will
also be expected to maintain the current equipment inventory and transport original
media and equipment between facilities and from various clients along the east coast.
Making the recordings available online “gives an opportunity for the collections from smaller communities to shine,” Pfotenhauer said. “Wisconsin has a lot of these great records outside of Madison or Milwaukee, and we can make some of them more visible.”
Dana Gerber-Margie was hired as a temporary staffer for the planning period. She traveled around Wisconsin to assess oral history archives in 22 facilities from Superior to Milwaukee, from Antigo to Richland Center...
For the summer of 2018, we will offer two six- to eight-week paid internships, one in audiovisual preservation and one in data rescue and recovery. During this period, the interns will gain an understanding of the processes of audiovisual and data preservation reformatting, and have the opportunity to contribute to a particular area of preservation work of their choosing. The internships will each result in a professional level project. Past interns have conducted preservation research and documentation, created shipping and storage guidelines, participated in conservation treatments of materials, and more.
I have no particular interest in sports. Never have. The closest this pointy-headed, bookie, piano & harpsichord player ever came to participating in an organized sport was playing saxophone in the marching band in high school. Nonetheless, sports is hard to avoid. About 14 years ago, while I was the engineer at The Philadelphia Orchestra...
So how does an archivist learn how to preserve audio and video materials, anyway? Some people (like me) attend a specialized graduate program; others pursue internships or learn on the job. The Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellowship (PBPF), a new IMLS-funded program from WGBH and the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB), is trying to combine a little of Column A with a little of Column B. Through the PBPF, the WGBH is collaborating with universities and public broadcasting stations around the country to provide semester-long graduate Fellowships for currently-enrolled students to get hands-on experience in audio and video preservation.
The first five Fellows begin their projects this week – but before getting thrown into the deep end...
Like most people, like most companies, the work we do has changed over the years. When we started preserving audio collections in 1990, copying to ¼” analog tape was the standard. Digital was still a new, uncertain thing. Audiovisual and data preservation is now the bulk of what we do. Prior to 1990 most of our work was in recording classical music on location – live concerts and CDs. I worked with The Philadelphia Orchestra for 21 year and have recorded over 4,000 live concerts, half with The Fabulous Philadelphians. Though our preservation business has grown more quickly, we still record a lot of classical music.
George Blood runs a studio in Philadelphia piled high with audio-visual equipment. But among all that equipment, Blood has a special four-armed turntable that makes him the perfect candidate to permanently archive the hundreds of thousands of random, discarded 78 rpm records amassed by The Internet Archive. It's an ecclectic batch of audio from another time. Blood and his team of archivists are finding new historical artifacts every day, and making sure that they'll be playable well into the future.
In a special episode of our podcast, The Outline World Dispatch, Zoë Beery reports from Philadelphia about how the Great 78 Project plans to preserve our aural history for generations to come.
This week we’ll be heading to the Association of Moving Image Archivists [www.amianet.org] for their annual conference. Joining me are Biz Gallo, Manager of Audiovisual Preservation, Sarah Mainville, registrar, and Nora Egloff, Data Storage Managers. We have two special things to look forward to at the conference. Biz will be giving her first professional presentation since joining our staff. And at Thursday morning’s plenary I will present the first George Blood LP Women in Audiovisual Archiving and Technology Scholarship.
In many ways, in most ways, AV artifacts are like any others you’ll encounter in libraries, archives, and museums. All the basics of care and handling apply – lower temperature, lower humidity, lower UV, lower dust, proper containers, gentle handling. Though the specifics may vary, the big picture does not.
Looking back on the history of what is now George Blood Audio/Video/Film/Data, our first identity in the archives community, Safe Sound Archive, is in climate controlled storage
Please welcome two new hires, Jenna Fleming and Rafiq Young, who have joined us this month.
Rafiq is our new Shipping Manager. He is a Philly creative who dabbles in everything from painting to experimenting with micro computers. Also enjoys showing his 4 year old the wonders of 80’s animated cartoons!
Jenna Fleming is our new Audiovisual Project Manager. She is interested in the digital humanities and her research experience involves written correspondence in the First World War.
Applicants new to the trade will work with senior staff and Production Supervisor for training
and supervision; experienced applicants will be expected to work independently after training
on our systems; understanding of basic audio signal flow recommended, but not required.
Responsibilities:
I’ve spent the last few days at the Library of Congress for the Radio Preservation Taskforce conference. The organizing committee, and Josh Shepherd in particular, deserves high praise for the range of topics and voices that were heard. Unlike most conferences where a few people sport long PowerPoint presentations, this one had many short talks. Sessions covered acquisition, preservation, born digital, commercial radio, engagement, and future plans for the RPT. I confess to belonging to a large group of presenters who whined, “How is this supposed to work?” I enjoyed not only the range of topics and voices heard, but the high level of civility and respect. Whether presenter, discussant, or audience member, everyone kept their comments brief and on point, with respectful and thoughtful exchanges. All the sessions were recorded, some of the live-streamed, and will be available from their website.
Here are a few experiences that made the event worthwhile for me...
FOR DECADES, THE BASEMENT OF the Boston Public Library was hiding something pretty amazing. A collection of nearly 200,000 rarely heard, unseen-by-the-public vinyl LPs and shellac 78s were tucked away in storage in the library’s central branch. Now, through a partnership with the digital library Internet Archive, these records are about to get a second life.
The initiative will digitize all 200,000 pieces of the BPL’s collection and make them publicly available, as rights allow, for the first time in a very long time. First up are the library’s collection of 78s. These records, which date from about 1898 to the 1950s, will be digitized as part of the Internet Archive’s Great 78 Project, an initiative to digitize, preserve, and study these rare records. “These 78s are disappearing right and left. It is important that we do a good job preserving what we can get to, because there won’t be a second chance,” said George Blood, an audio preservationist working on the project, in a press release announcing the digitization.
“Through this innovative collaboration, the Internet Archive will bring significant portions of these sound archives online and to life in a way that we couldn’t do alone,” David Leonard, president of the Boston Public Library, says in a statement announcing the initiative.
The library’s collection of 78 rpm recordings, fragile precursors to the LP that were made from shellac, will be included in the digitization effort as part of the Internet Archive’s Great 78 Project, which is working to preserve more than 20 collections of obsolete sound technology.
“The simple fact of the matter is most audiovisual recordings will be lost,” says George Blood, an audio preservation expert who will work on digitizing the library’s collection, according to the library’s statement. “These 78s are disappearing right and left. It is important that we do a good job preserving what we can get to, because there won’t be a second chance.”
Sweeney reports that officials from the Internet Archive have already started boxing up the recordings, which will be sent to Blood in Philadelphia. Where rights allow, the digitized recordings will be available for free streaming and download. Physical copies will be stored in San Francisco, where the Internet Archive is based.
