Share in our discoveries across three projects as we work to provide the first intellectual access to our hidden treasures relating to work and labor in early 20th Century New England, the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair and its period, and Boston local TV news.

Thursday, August 25, 2011

PBCore Workshop at AMIA Conference

Wednesday, November 16, 2011
A full day at the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin
Association of Moving Image Archivists Annual Conference (Nov 16-19)

A PBCore Cataloging Workshop

  REGISTRATION IS CLOSED, WORKSHOP FULL   

"PBCore provides a level of detail useful to media archives, without being ridiculous to implement." --Jack Brighton.
PBCore is a metadata standard created for the description of analog and digital media objects. This workshop is an all-day followup to AMIA 2010 PBCore conference sessions that will enable catalogers and others to evaluate and prepare to adopt PBCore for management of their AV assets. We will include demonstrations of PBCore's value in handling intellectual content, rights, and technical metadata and will present specific case studies. Attendees will create PBCore records in custom exercises.

PBCore 2.0 was released in early 2011: The instructors will present the schema and uses in detail, from mandatory elements through newly-added attributes. PBCore can either include or reference data from other schemas; the workshop will look at its future in the semantic Web as well as practical entry-level steps to adoption.
Among other PBCore advantages is that its use is free to all and there are database tools already in use including a variety of open source software applications.

Presenters include PBCore experts Jack Brighton, New Media & Innovation, Illinois Public Media at WILL; Brian Graney, Media Cataloger at Northeast Historic Film; Dave Rice and Kara Van Malssen, audiovisual metadata specialists, Audiovisual Preservation Solutions.

Thanks to the Harry Ransom Center for hosting, AMIA conference program committee, and CLIR Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives for supporting the workshop through a grant to Northeast Historic Film.

Friday, August 19, 2011

A Camera Chart for the Fair

The Amateur Cinema League's Movie Makers periodical published a "Camera Chart," actually an annotated schematic map, for the New York World's Fair in 1939. Cataloger Brian Graney identified and prepared the map as a signature element of our access and interpretive tools.

Website visitors will be able to use the map to browse amateur films by fair zones. The map, a two-page spread in the large-format magazine with another column identifying camera-worthy fair features, is also available for download as a PDF.

Locations on the map are numbered, for example at site 27, "The Parachute Jump will let you film while you are jumping." We have not yet noted a reel capturing a falling cameraperson.

Perhaps such reels will appear at the Home Movie Day event scheduled for Saturday, October 15, at Queens Museum of Art, in Queens, NY, from 1 to 5 p.m.

Home Movie Day at Queens Museum of Art is free to the public; anyone who has amateur film from the 1939-1940 fair, who attended the fair, and people of all ages interested in learning more about amateur film, please write to be added to the mailing list for our Home Movie Day event: brian@oldfilm.org