Canadian Audiovisual Archives: The Politics of Preservation and Access

In 2005, in the spirit of Canadas total archives philosophy, the Western University Archives in London, Ontario acquired over ninety regional films on 8mm. Archival staff digitized the films in a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) fashion: they were simply repaired, projected, and captured off the wall with a digital camera. The raw files were then processed and given basic titling before being exported onto DVDs for public and institutional sale. While digitization was quite rudimentary, the public has access to a forgotten regional history. This dissertation analyzes the tensions and politics of audiovisual acquisition, preservation, and dissemination by recounting steps taken by DIY archivists to bring films from a personal archive to an institutional archive. I trace this collection of amateur itinerant films as they move from the filmmakers home in Dundee, New York, to the Western Archives. Reverend Leroy (Roy) Massecar (1918-2003) was a Baptist Minister and itinerant filmmaker who between 1947-1949 visited over ninety towns throughout Central and Southwestern Ontario, documenting daily life, screening films in these towns as Stars of the Town See Yourself and Your Friends on the Screen! and capturing the fleeting energy of small town rural Ontario. The dissertation mobilizes what Canadian archivist Terry Cook calls, archival contextual knowledge, a history from the bottom-up, and uses this case study to highlight larger issues facing Canadian audiovisual collections in the early 21st century: the shifting value in antiquated audiovisual formats and marginal film collections; the tension between professional preservation and public access; the hidden labour of audiovisual archivists; and the politics of DIY audiovisual discourse. I make the labour and bureaucracy of traditional archives visible by examining the discourses of the Archive not only within a theoretical space, but also in actual archive spaces whether physical or digital. I argue that bringing transparency to the roles and actions of donors, artists, archivists, scholars, and the public will allow for the larger ecology of Canadian audiovisual preservation to be activated, allowing actors in each point of the cycle to collectively move towards a holistic and networked audiovisual preservation strategy

BOMEX bulletin, no. 7

Abstracts of BOMEX related conference papers, sample products from BOMEX cloud photography and radar surveillance, and status summaries of BOMEX data processing and reductio

Management of e-Resources in R amp; D Centers: A Case Study of the Information Center at NAL13;

The developments in information technology and their applications to library and information services have given new dimension to the entire spectrum of information management. The information generated is usually stored in four physical media: paper, film, optical, and magnetic disks. The e-document be it a book, journal, technical report, conference proceedings is portable; has random access to its contents; and the document can also be a multimedia object, in that it may contain not only text, but also graphics, drawings, photographs or video. Now we have the emergence of publications over the electronic networks and the activity took off in a big way following the invention of the World Wide Web. The Open Access movement is becoming the order of the day. More than 3000 journals are free on net for anybody to access. A number of Institutional repositories and e-Prints archives have thrown challenge to the publishing industry. Consortium approach through different pricing, management and licensing models is enabling the libraries to provide access to thousands of e- journals, e-books and other kinds of e-documents. The Information center at NAL with its state-of-the-art library has progressed a good deal in this direction by acquiring different kind of documents especially e-form, cataloguing amp; processing them appropriately, storing and giving access to its patrons not only in library premises, but on to the desk tops spread in three different campuses through laboratory LAN and also extending selected services through Internet for the benefit of any body from any part of the world. 13; Created and maintained by ICAST the Portal x2018;AeroInfox2019; (www.aeroinfo.org.in) serves as one window information search facility for Web sources in aerospace science and technology. This virtual library facilitates multiple approach to information seekers as the web sources are indexed and organised using different schemes of classification including NASA subject categories. Care is taken to cover Indian aerospace sources exhaustively. The ICAST site (www.icast.org.in), apart from giving detailed information about library sources including books, journals, E-journals, databases and technical reports makes available different search tools for its users. Other details like working hours, library rules, staff details, contact persons, etc are provided. One can submit an online query and suggest documents for acquisition using online forms provided. The Library Database (OPAC) is probably is single largest in the country with more than 3.25 lakh bibliographic records of books, technical reports, patents, standards, journals, etc. ICAST users can search International databases like Aerospace Database, NTIS, J-Gate, Medline, etc through campus LAN. Users can access more than 2500 full text journals covering titles published by Elsevier (ScienceDirect), ASME, AIAA, Springer, John Wiley, OUP, CUP, AMS, World Scientific, few Annual Series, etc. Created by ICAST an e-journals gateway with browse and search (alphabetical and subject wise) facility for titles provides access to more than 700 journals available free on the net. The Centre provides a number of web/e-mail based innovative information services including Journal Contents Service, News Clipping Service, Monthly Documents Additions Lists covering both Books and Technical Reports, Web Alert Service and Union Catalogue of Journals -CSIR and Aerospace Libraries, etc

Information Outlook, April 2006

Volume 10, Issue 4https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_io_2006/1003/thumbnail.jp

Erotic Fever in The ArQuives: Imagining a Queer Porn Paradise in Cait McKinney and Hazel Meyer’s Exhibition Tape Condition: degraded

Focusing on Cait McKinney and Hazel Meyer’s site-specific exhibition Tape Condition: degraded (2016) at the ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ+ Archives, this paper explores reparative and desire-driven approaches for working with partial and missing histories within archives. Focusing specifically on artists working as archivists, I consider how the limitations of evidence-based histories can be addressed through creative practice. The essay unfolds in two parts. The first examines a selection of objects from the exhibition to draw out the historical context of The ArQuives, grounding my analysis of the conditions that have created and perpetuated specific archival gaps; in this case, pornography made by or featuring lesbian and trans-identified people. I consider how the animation of specific historical narratives anchors the exhibition as an archival intervention that positioned The ArQuives broadly as a site of community, conflict, censorship, and activism in the past and the present. The second part of the paper examines key elements of the exhibition that exemplify McKinney and Meyer’s reparative approach to archival practice. Drawing on Eve Sedgwick’s (2003) theorization reparative reading practices as a strategy of creative resistance and resilience in queer life and Eve Tuck’s (2009) definition of desire-based community research, I argue that McKinney and Meyer practiced a creative methodology that supplants the paranoid position of archive fever with an erotic reparative impulse, or erotic fever

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation - 2006 Annual Report

Contains program information, grantee profiles, grants list, and financial statements

From museum to memory institution: the politics of European culture online

Museums, libraries and archives have long been considered the retainers of some form of collective memory. Within the last twenty years, the term ‘memory institution’ has been coined to describe these entities, which is symptomatic of the fact that such places are increasingly linked through digital media and online networks. The concept of the memory institution is also part of the vocabulary used to promote broader cultural integration across nations, and appears in discussions of European heritage and in policy documents concerning the digitization of cultural heritage collections. To explore the relationship between cultural heritage, memory and digital technology further, this paper will examine the large-scale digitization project Europeana, under which museums, libraries and archives are re-defined as cultural heritage institutions or memory institutions. My purpose is to trace the conceptual trajectory of memory within this context, and to address how the idea of a European cultural memory structured by technology holds implications for institutions traditionally associated with practices of remembering

Digital mammography, cancer screening: Factors important for image compression

The use of digital mammography for breast cancer screening poses several novel problems such as development of digital sensors, computer assisted diagnosis (CAD) methods for image noise suppression, enhancement, and pattern recognition, compression algorithms for image storage, transmission, and remote diagnosis. X-ray digital mammography using novel direct digital detection schemes or film digitizers results in large data sets and, therefore, image compression methods will play a significant role in the image processing and analysis by CAD techniques. In view of the extensive compression required, the relative merit of 'virtually lossless' versus lossy methods should be determined. A brief overview is presented here of the developments of digital sensors, CAD, and compression methods currently proposed and tested for mammography. The objective of the NCI/NASA Working Group on Digital Mammography is to stimulate the interest of the image processing and compression scientific community for this medical application and identify possible dual use technologies within the NASA centers