Workshops

A full and varied series of our popular Workshops, free to all registered delegates, will be delivered by IASA experts. Abstracts and schedules of these sessions can also be seen on our programme page.

There will be limited capacity for these sessions. If you wish to attend one or more, please make a booking when you register for the conference.

IMPORTANT - Note that the 3rd October workshops overlap:
Thursday morning workshops: do not select more than one of: W4 or W5 or W7; or else, W6 and/or W13.
Thursday afternoon workshops: do not select more than one of: W10 only, or W12 only; or else, W8 or W11 and/or W9

You can see the timetable of all workshops here: http://2019.iasa-web.org/programme - select the 'Grid' option from the Schedule button to view the sessions side by side.

Monday September 30th, 13:30-15:00
W1: The Safeguarding of the Audiovisual Heritage: Ethics, Principles, and Preservation Strategy (IASA-TC 03)
Speaker: Dietrich Schüller.
Room: Theatre 1 (maximum 200 places)
Co-edited by Will Prentice and Lars Gaustad, this is the 4th Edition, published in 2017. While the earlier versions concentrated on audio, this new edition is extending these general principles and strategies to include moving images. The tutorial concentrates on the content migration for audio and video documents, the only viable method to preserve their contents in the long-term, because of the instability of original carriers and the obsolescence of replay equipment. The principles of optimal signal extraction from original carriers, unmodified transfer to digital archival formats, and the importance of metadata for the authentication of contents will be discussed.

Tuesday October 1st 09:30-10.30
W2: RDA and audiovisual archives
Speaker: Nadia Lai.
Room: Theatre 2 (maximum 80 places)
RDA (Resource Description and Access) is a cataloging standard that was first published in 2010. RDA was designed on the one hand to be compatible with the legacy of preceding cataloging rules (AACR2 - Anglo American Cataloging Rules), and on the other hand to better respond to new challenges, mainly coming from the digital world. Since its publication, RDA has been adopted by an increasing number of cultural organisations, mainly libraries. What about audiovisual archives? Is RDA used at all? Can RDA be considered a suitable standard for audiovisual archives? Are any changes required for RDA to become more suitable? If so, which ones? By first presenting and explaining RDA’s structure, its evolution, and the conceptual models that inform it, this tutorial will try to answer these questions. Particular attention will be paid to RDA’s current capacity to respond to the needs of audiovisual archives.

Tuesday October 1st, 13:30-15.00
W3: Handling and storage of audio and video carriers (IASA-TC 05)
Speaker: Dietrich Schüller.
Room: Theatre 1 (maximum 200 places)
Edited by Dietrich Schüller and Albrecht Häfner, IASA-TC 05 was published in 2014. While IASA-TC 03, presented in another tutorial at this conference, underlines that, ultimately, long-term preservation of audiovisual documents can only be achieved by "eternal" digital content migration, IASA-TC 05 explains that carrier preservation still maintains its important place in audiovisual archiving, as by far not all audiovisual documents have as yet been transferred to digital repositories. Also, IASA-TC 03 strongly recommends that originals be kept for potential future reference. IASA-TC 05 explains how handling and storage of audio and video carriers can be optimised to preserve original holdings until professional long-term preservation can be organised and financed. In this presentation, reference will also be made to specific precautions against the unfavourable climatic conditions in tropical zones.

Thursday October 3rd, 09:00-12.30
W4: Overview of IASA-TC 06 Guidelines for Video Preservation: Formats, Carriers and Workflow
Speakers: George Blood, Peter Bubestinger-Steindl, Carl Fleischhauer, Lars Gaustad, Somaya Langley, Andy Martin, Jerome Martinez, Kate Murray.
Room: Theatre 1 (maximum 200 places)
IASA-TC 06 Guidelines for the Preservation of Video Recordings was published online as modules in early 2018 (https://www.iasa-web.org/tc06/guidelines-preservation-video-recordings). This workshop will walk participants through the technical details of each section of the guidelines including the video carriers, signal and signal extraction as well as planning, setup, and workflows for video digitisation. IASA-TC 06 identifies six classes of video recordings, each with its own strategies and methods to support the long-term preservation of the underlying content. For the most part, the scope for the initial edition of IASA-TC 06 is limited to the digitisation of "class 1," analogue videotapes, and transfer of content from selected types of digital videotapes. Work is ongoing, with later editions planned to cover born-digital video, metadata, and the production of new video recordings in preservable formats. The discussions of target formats for digitised video will include updates on new standards work for the Matroska and MXF wrappers and the FFV1 codec. This interactive session will give participants the opportunity to gain an understanding of the first version of these in-depth guidelines. Participants will also be able to provide feedback and comments on the existing sections of IASA-TC 06 as well as help shape the forthcoming planned sections on born-digital video content.

Thursday October 3rd, 09:00-12.30
W5: Safeguarding the RTS broadcast lacquer discs: challenges of a multifaceted project
Speakers: Karen Beun, Emiliano Flores, Patricia Herold, Eric Monge, Rebecca Rochat.
Room: Twitter Large, Media Park (next to the conference venue; maximum 60 places)
The 80,000 lacquer disc audio recordings of RTS (Radio Télévision Suisse) are a unique collection spanning from the 1930s to the 1950s. The disc collection covers contents including radio dramas, classical music, and news reports, among many others. The various types of lacquers used throughout the years make this collection an interesting case study, from a chemist and/or a curator point of view. The digitization of these broadcast archives is an 8-year long service provided by the French GECKO company. Patricia Herold will mention the FONSART organization and its overall history in safeguarding and promoting archives. She will speak about the various steps in setting up the RTS discs safeguarding project, and she will present a comparison of the Visual Audio optical digitization technique, compared to the standard stylus playback technique. Mrs. Herold will briefly mention the history of the various sub-collections. The partnership with the GECKO company, in terms of logistics, cataloguing, digital file integration, and monitoring the production done by GECKO will be mentioned. Eric Monge, IT manager at GECKO, will present MADAMS, GECKO's in-house workflow and database management system. Karen Beun, production manager, will focus on the technical workflow, and go into details about the metadata provided and the various disc playback techniques used throughout the project. Finally, Emiliano Flores, restoration manager, will present the digital restoration aspect of the project. Rebecca Rochat, preventive preservation expert, will present her digital guide with the results of her several-year long research on lacquer discs, which is expected to be an important landmark for all specialists of the topic. A chemist and microscopic approach to the deterioration of lacquer discs will be developed.

Thursday October 3rd, 09:00-10.30
W6: The composition of digital audio and video files
Speaker: Bertram Lyons.
Room: Theatre 2 (maximum 80 places)
As more and more collection objects are born-digital and non-physical in nature, archivists must develop core competencies regarding the fundamental nature of digital objects. Just as knowledge of the chemical composition of cellulose (for example) is essential for the care and maintenance of paper materials, the knowledge of file construction at a bit-level is essential for archivist to make careful decisions about what are and are not unique characteristics of a given digital collection object and how best to determine sustainable and safe care and maintenance plans for the digital collection object over time. This tutorial illustrates the fundamental binary elements of digital audio and video objects, from bits to bytes to formal format structures. The tutorial will demonstrate methods for understanding and interpreting these many technological layers, including how to translate bytes into understandable information based on file format specifications, and how to distinguish file object information from file system information in order to understand the true boundaries of a digital object within a given computer system.

Thursday October 3rd, 09:00-12.30
W7: FFmpeg for audio-visual archivists (maximum 25 participants) Note: Participants must bring their own laptops for this workshop. They will be provided with the necessary software at the workshop. Same workshop as W12. 2 PLACES LEFT!
Speakers: Joshua Ng, Reto Kromer.
Room: Benglabs 2 (maximum 25 places)
Over the past many years, an ecosystem of free and open source software for long-term digital preservation has been developed. One of the tools is FFmpeg, a solution for processing, transcoding, filtering, analysing, and playing audiovisual files. Due to its extensive and actively developed codec library, FFmpeg has been integrated as a crucial element into many film and video archives worldwide. This workshop will present why FFmpeg is relevant to archivists and how it can be applied for digital preservation of the the cultural heritage. Participants will learn how to install the software on their computers and master the use of it with audiovisual files. They will use the applications (FFmpeg itself includes a suite of applications) to perform several tasks, including lossless transcoding, technical inspection, timecode burn-in, compression for access, and quality control. Lessons and hands-on activities will alternate. Topics will include a refresher on digital audio and digital video; file structure: container, codec, raw data; different file formats for different purposes: archive master, mezzanine files for postproduction, access files; and audiovisual data transformations.

Thursday October 3rd, 11:00-12.30
W13: Europeana Media: Using IIIF/AV to improve online audiovisual collections FULLY BOOKED
Speakers: Speaker: Marco Rendina, Mathy Vanbuel, Sally Reynolds, Abiodun Ogunyemi, Erwin Verbruggen.
Room: Theatre 2 (maximum 80 places)
Large swaths of publicly available audiovisual archives collections across Europe have been linked and made available to Europeana, Europe’s cultural heritage platform. The Europeana Media project aims to increase the appeal, visibility, reuse, research of and interaction with moving image and sound materials on the platform. By building on the IIIF/AV framework, our aim is to deliver functionalities that will offer researchers, educators and the public at large functionalities to better access and incorporate AV content from Europeana into their daily living and working environments, such as video fragment quoting, support for subtitling, and embedding media. This workshop will go into the aggregation and publishing landscape for European AV collections and outline the technical challenges related to unifying streaming output from various collectaions and sources. We are curious to hear attendees' own streaming approaches and solutions!

Thursday October 3rd, 13:30-15.00
W8: Improving metadata in DPX files: Open source tools and guidelines from FADGI
Speakers: Bertram Lyons,  Kate Murray.
Room: Twitter Large, Media Park (next to the conference venue; maximum 60 places)
The US Federal Agency Digital Guidelines Initiative (FADGI), in conjunction with AVP, is developing a new open source tool for format validation and batch embedding and correcting metadata within DPX file headers. Named "embARC" for "Metadata Embedded for Archival Content," the software application has flexible functionality to follow both required SMPTE metadata rules as well as those defined by FADGI in the document "Guidelines for Embedded Metadata within DPX File Headers for Digitized Motion Picture Film," including tracking the digitization workflow. The DPX format is a raster image format often used for the image only data for scanned motion picture film with each frame of film translating to a separate file. Because there are many thousands of frames for each title, there are typically many thousands of DPX files to manage. FADGI’s research into DPX implementations discovered that there are often inconsistencies within the file’s structure and header information.These scope and scale issues make file management a challenge. The embARC tool enables users to audit and correct internal metadata of both individual files or an entire DPX sequence while not impacting the image data. embARC will be released as a beta version early in 2019 with a first official release in summer 2019.

Thursday October 3rd, 13:30-15.00; 15:30-17.00
W10: A bluffers guide to sound and digital audio
Speaker: Neil Garner.
Room: Theatre 2 (maximum 80 places)
2 complementary training workshops. In Part 1, we will use demonstrations to explore the relationship between frequency and pitch, amplitude and loudness, and harmonics and timbre. We will seek to understand how we quantify and measure sound and why this is important to audio quality and the way we archive content. In Part 2, we will demonstrate how we turn analogue sounds into digital signals. We will look at the importance of sampling, quantisation, data rates, and the importance of error management. Finally we will look at choosing a compression algorithm and what happens if we reduce the size of a file.

Thursday October 3rd, 13:30-15.00
W11: NEMOSINE - The future of media storage
Speaker: Nadja Wallaszkovits.
Room: Theatre 1 (maximum 200 places)
NEMOSINE is an EU founded project for the development of Innovative packaging solutions for storage and conservation of 20th century cultural heritage of artefacts based on cellulose derivatives. The objective of project NEMOSINE www.nemosineproject.eu is to improve traditional storage solutions by developing an innovative package with the main goal of energy saving and extending the life time of cultural objects based on cellulose derivatives. In contrast to conventional film cans or media boxes, the packages will be equipped with the latest sensor technology to monitor decomposition processes and adsorb decomposition products such as acetic acid. The focus is on films, photographs, posters, slides, cinematographic sound, magnetic tapes and discs, based on cellulose acetate and its derivatives. The aim of the four-year project is to achieve more efficient long-term archiving and to increase the life cycle of audiovisual media, as well as other objects of cultural heritage and arts. Beyond the state of the art, NEMOSINE is developing the following modular and integrated products: High O2 barrier and active packaging using non-odour additives; Active acid adsorbers based on functionalized Metal Organic Framework (MOFs) integrated in innovative porous structures; Gas detection sensors based on nanotechnology for monitoring degradation products; Multi-scale modelling to correlate degradation & sensor signals for maintenance prediction and integrate all these technologies; Packaging with modular design to fulfill the technical & economical requirements of the different cultural heritage items made by cellulose derivatives; Curative packages containing controlled release of natural antifungal additives. The modular solution is one of main advantages of the innovative package. This design will allow to provide different versions of the product with more or less technology included in the solution: Protective (basic and premium model), and Curative (for damaged products). In this way, the smart package can be adapted to different type of final clients –private collectors, national museums, regional collections, councils and institutions, schools-, in terms of necessities, balancing real value of the content and the package cost. The complete solution for storage boxes proposed by NEMOSINE is based on multi-nano sensors for different gases (mainly acetic acid and nitric oxide) and a control software platform that simulates degradation processes and then will predict accurate protective treatments.

Thursday October 3rd, 13:30-17.00
W12: FFmpeg for audio-visual archivists  (maximum 25 participants) Note: Participants must bring their own laptops for this workshop. They will be provided with the necessary software at the workshop. Same workshop as W7.  2 PLACES LEFT!
Speakers: Joshua Ng, Reto Kromer.
Room: Benglabs 2 (maximum 25 places)
Over the past many years, an ecosystem of free and open source software for long-term digital preservation has been developed. One of the tools is FFmpeg, a solution for processing, transcoding, filtering, analysing, and playing audiovisual files. Due to its extensive and actively developed codec library, FFmpeg has been integrated as a crucial element into many film and video archives worldwide. This workshop will present why FFmpeg is relevant to archivists and how it can be applied for digital preservation of the the cultural heritage. Participants will learn how to install the software on their computers and master the use of it with audiovisual files. They will use the applications (FFmpeg itself includes a suite of applications) to perform several tasks, including lossless transcoding, technical inspection, timecode burn-in, compression for access, and quality control. Lessons and hands-on activities will alternate. Topics will include a refresher on digital audio and digital video; file structure: container, codec, raw data; different file formats for different purposes: archive master, mezzanine files for postproduction, access files; and audiovisual data transformations.

Thursday October 3rd, 15:30-17.00
W9: Quality control for media digitization projects
Speaker: Mike Casey.
Room: Theatre 1 (maximum 200 places)
Participants in this workshop will gain hands-on experience identifying and interpreting QC-related audio and video issues. They will have the option of working through an online course module prior to the workshop to begin developing critical listening skills for QC work with audio. The workshop will also feature discussions of the differences between quality control and quality assurance, the types of quality control, and applying risk management strategies to the QC endeavor. A laptop is advised in order to get the most out of the workshop. Files for use in the workshop will be made available for download in advance.