Janel Quirante, assistant archivist for visual materials, was a presenter on the panel “From Vault to Computer/TV Screen: Sharing Your Moving Image Treasures with the World” at the Society of California Archivists’ recent annual general meeting in Riverside, California. The session explored digitizing options for archival video and ways in which archives are using YouTube, the Internet Archive, and Amazon to make their collections more accessible to the general web-surfing public.
Janel’s presentation, titled “Buckley-on-Demand: Distribution of Archival Moving Images through Amazon’s CreateSpace Disc-on-Demand,” focused on the Hoover Institution’s partnering with Amazon to sell DVDs of the television show Firing Line. She used video clips and photographs from the collection to illustrate the issues that the Hoover Institution and other archives face when distributing archival moving images: copyright, preservation, and metadata. Janel also discussed how Hoover’s Firing Line DVD distribution model is self-sustaining in that royalty earnings from the DVD sales are going toward funding ongoing preservation costs of the collection, making it possible to put more Firing Line shows on Amazon.
A second session at the SCA meeting was organized and moderated by Hoover Institution archives specialist Jessica Lemieux, who also served on the conference’s program committee. Entitled “Selecting Collection Management Software,” the session guided some fifty archivists and administrators through the benefits and potential pitfalls of selecting and implementing collection management software to improve workflows and public access to archival collections. The session set out selection criteria based on the needs and resources of different archives and presented the implementation experiences of business and academic archivists as well as an industry expert.
