Conference to Focus on Media Preservation

The Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) is set to hold its annual conference in Portland, Oregon, from November 18-21. The event will bring together over 600 members of the global media preservation community to discuss the safeguarding and accessibility of valuable archival elements.

As part of the conference lineup, representatives from Hollywood studios, universities, national and regional archives, corporate libraries, museums, and more will present case studies and workshops.

Highlights Include

  • Maintaining television archives, including the 27-year-old C-SPAN Archives, which contain over 210,000 hours of free online, indexed, digital content that can be viewed, clipped, and shared. Learn how this national network saves every minute of its three 24-hour broadcasts.
  • Experts from the Academy Film Archive and George Eastman Museum will trace the journey of a hypothetical collection (illustrated by several real-world examples) from arrival at the repository to assessment and inventory, de-accession and disposal while distilling a collection to its essential material that effectively honors the work, artists, and donors.
  • Archivists from the Big Ten and Pac-12 sports conferences, along with Chicago Film Archives and Northeast Historic Film, will discuss creative approaches to funding, copyright, and licensing, digital preservation, and storage of sports collections.
  • Paramount Pictures will offer an in-depth look into their archiving practices, including how they assess the condition of their collections, developed the process of prioritization, and established principles for digital preservation.
  • The Academy Color Encoding System (ACES) was released to the industry in December 2014 as a production-ready suite of technical standards, best practices, and support tools. This presentation will explain how productions using ACES generate archive-ready files and the file formats and related standards that support long-term archiving of digital motion picture materials.
  • The British Film Institute will review its ongoing project to unlock moving images for new audiences with the digitization and publication of 10,000 films in partnership with UK Regional and National archives and rights holders.

In addition to the full conference schedule for attendees, several screenings will be open to the general public. Seats are available on a first-come, first-served basis. A selection of free screenings includes:

Public Screenings

  • Paris is Burning: Friday, November 20, 7:45 p.m., Whitsell Auditorium, Northwest Film Center.
  • The Thanhouser Studio and the Birth of American Cinema: Saturday, November 21, 11:00 a.m., Whitsell Auditorium, Northwest Film Center.
  • This is Cinerama: Remastered: Saturday, November 21, 1:00 p.m., Whitsell Auditorium, Northwest Film Center.

AMIA also partners with the Digital Library Federation for Hack Days, where practitioners and managers of digital audiovisual collections join developers and engineers for an intense day of collaboration to develop and refine simple tools for digital audiovisual preservation and access. The groups will compete to come up with the award-winning solution.