Cutting Room Floor: Editing Language in Time-Based Media Collections

AMIA

New methods and old challenges around accessible description for time-based media collections.

Time-based media collections have the unique role of often serving both research and entertainment purposes and have specific needs around language that other archives may not. The presentation will introduce new methods and old challenges around accessible description for time-based media collections.Topics That Will Be Covered<ul><li>Language: Catalogs, Archives, Standards</li><li>Internal Vocabularies and Messy Data</li><li>Language: Programming for Film</li><li>Language: Patrons and Researchers</li></ul>Who Should Attend. Anyone who works with Time-based media collections and writes descriptions, whether you are a processing archivist, cataloger, social media manager, or head of programming.What Should You Already Know. Basic familiarity with how time-based media is described in archival and programming contexts might be useful, but no previous knowledge is requiredLearning Objective. Attendees will learn how to look at past description with a critical eye, and how to plan ahead to create description that is accurate and appropriate for a wide range of audiences and outcomesPresenters<ul><li>Dorothy Berry, Digital Collections Manager, Houghton Library, Harvard University</li><li>Amy Sloper, Collections Archivist, Harvard Film Archive</li></ul>Moderators<ul><li>Brianna Toth, Preservation Archivist, Academy Film Archive; AMIA Program Manager for Online Education; AMIA Continuing Education Advisory (CEA) Task Force Member</li><li>Jamie Marie Wagner, Moving Image Archivist, University of Colorado Boulder Libraries</li></ul>Amy Sloper. Working as the Collections Archivist of the Harvard Film Archive since 2019, Amy Sloper (she/her/hers) manages all preservation projects, research access to the collections, and manages and coordinates new acquisitions from budgets and donor relations to archival processing and description. She is the main point of contact for researchers and regularly collaborates with colleagues in and outside of Harvard on developing workflows and policies toward improving practices in the field of moving image archiving. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Communication Arts Department and UCLA’s Moving Image Archive Studies program, she has held positions at the Director’s Guild of America, the UCLA Film &amp; Television Archive, the Getty Research Institute, the Wisconsin Center for Film &amp; Theater Research, the UW-Madison iSchool, and previously worked for seven years as a film conservator for the HFA. She is a founding member of the Community Archiving Workshop and serves on the board of the Center for Home Movies.Dorothy Berry (she/her/hers) is the Digital Collections Program Manager at Houghton Library, Harvard University. She graduated from the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology with an MA and the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University, with an MLS. She previously served as Chair of the Archivists and Archives of Color Section of the Society of American Archivists, and as been honored as a Library Journal "Mover and Shaker," and a Mark A. Greene Emerging Leader award winner. Her work focuses on the intersections of information science and African American history.Brianna Toth (she/her/hers) is a Preservation Archivist at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts &amp; Sciences Film Archive and the Assistant Archivist at the Bob Baker Marionette Theater. As an archivist at the Academy, she works exclusively on the Blackhawk Films Collection. Her current research is concerned with the obsolescence of technical expertise within the field of moving image archiving and preservation. ​Brianna holds a Masters in Library Information Science with a focus on Media Archival Studies (MLIS MAS) from UCLA and a B.A. in Art History from the University of the Pacific. As an undergraduate, she also studied at Goldsmiths College in London in their Visual Cultures Department. She is the recipient of AMIA’s George Blood Women in Technology Scholarship, member of the Continuing Education Advisory (CEA) Task Force and serves as AMIA’s Program Manager for Online Education.Jamie Marie Wagner (she/her/hers) is the first dedicated Moving Image Archivist in the University of Colorado Boulder Libraries’ Rare and Distinctive Collections. Since 2019, she has overseen the Libraries’ archival film and video material, as well as collections related to Colorado media history and American experimental filmmaking. She holds an MA in Film and MLIS from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is currently the Rocky Mountain area representative to the AMIA Regional Audio-Visual Archives Committee and Continuing Education Coordinator for the Society of Rocky Mountain Archivists.