Digital Archives 2022

Digital Archives, Photo: © Manuela Clemens

The summer school "Digital Archives. Data Literacy and Presentation Strategies in Audiovisual Archives" is a 5-day, practice-oriented course aimed at people working in audiovisual archives as well as at everyone else who is interested in enhancing their knowledge about digital environments and processes related to digital archives.

Date: 5-9 September 2022

Language: English

Number of participants: 20-25 

Location: Filmuniversität Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF / Bundesarchiv Lichterfelde

Costs: 1030.00 EUR 

Students receive a discount of 10% percent of the regular price.

Early Bird before 30 April 2022: 930.00 EUR 

Typically, film archives are not archives in the traditional sense, but rather hybrid institutions that, due to their history and the complexity of film rights, often face major challenges when it comes to cataloguing, metadata management, transparency, and accessibility.

The ongoing process of digitalization presents film archives with the necessity of changing their workflows, strategies, and policies and of providing their staff with additional training. In order to support people and institutions with more knowledge, we decided to establish the "Digital Archives" Summer School in collaboration with Bundesarchiv and Deutsche Kinemathek as well as with support from the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF). The second edition focuses on the subject of digital curation.

Timetable

Monday (5.9.) 9:00 - 10:00 Arrival, Welcome, Introduction
  10:00 - 12:30 Input Participants
  12:30 - 14:00 Lunch
  14:00 - 17:30 Digitization Workflows (Ela Wysocka)
  17:30 - 19:30 Dinner
Tuesday (6.9.) 9:00 - 10:30 Theoretical Aspects of Digital Curation (Dr. Sarah Higgins)
  11:00 - 12:30 Long Term Preservation (Converting to FFV1) (Kieran O’Leary)
  12:30 - 14:00 Lunch
  14:00 - 15:30 Long-Term Preservation (File Normalization) (Etienne Marchand)
  16:00 - 17:30 Long-Term Preservation (Checking Files for Preservation) (Micky Lindlar)
Wednesday (7.9.) 9:00 - 10:30 Metaconcepts for Metadata (Barbara Fischer)
  11:00 - 12:30 Linked Open Data for Film Archives (Paul Duchesne, Dr. Adelheid Heftberger)
  12:30 - 14:00 Lunch
  14:00 - 15:30 Linked Open Data for Film Archives (Paul Duchesne, Dr. Adelheid Heftberger)
  16:00 - 17:30 Bundesarchiv (Guided Tour)
Thursday (8.9.) 9:00 - 10:30 Using Open Source Software (DCP-o-matic) (Oliver Hanley)
  11:00 - 12:30 Copyright for Film (Dr. Claudy Op den Kamp)
  12:30 - 14:00 Lunch
  14:00 - 15:30 Storytelling (Jürgen Keiper)
  16:00 - 17:30 Digital Curation in Practice (Prof. Dr. Giovanna Fossati)
  17:30 - 19:30 Dinner
Friday (9.9.) 9:00 - 12:00 City of Film Babelsberg (Guided Tour)
  12:00 - 12:30 Feedback Session
  12:30 - 14:00 Lunch and Departures

Topics

Emphasizing practical aspects, the Summer School will give participants the opportunity to present and discuss questions related to their daily work (Monday). We place great value on extensive feedback (Friday) enabling us to further improve the quality of the event.

 

The topics of the 2022 edition are the following:

  • Digital Curation: Lecture on the theoretical classification of the term "digital curation" with a focus on AV media.
  • Meta-Concepts for Metadata: Lecture on aggregating and making accessible film metadata.
  • Curation in film archival practice: Lecture on how to think and live curatorial approaches in film archival practice, including practical examples.

  • Digitization (I and II): Workflows of selecting and preparing materials for "retro" digitization as well as aspects of bidding, project management and technical processes.
  • Converting to FFV1: Hands-on introduction to converting video files to the FFV1 codec, which has become a standard in long-term archiving.

  • File normalization for long-term preservation: Presentation of the procedures for file normalization in a large television archive, followed by a discussion about the practical implementation in their own institutions.
  • Checking files for preservation: Practical advice and workflows for checking AV files in a large library followed by a discussion about practical applications in their own institutions.

  • Linked Open Data (LOD) / Ontologies: Includes both a theoretical as well as a practical part around the topic "Linked Open Data" in film archives, possible fields of application, links with Wikidata and the FIAF ontology.

  • Creation of a DCP: Hands-on introduction to the creation of a DCP using the DCP-o-matic software.

  • Rights: Workshop on AV-related copyright and usage rights, focusing on helpful strategies for making sense of this complex and difficult topic.

  • Storytelling: Introduction to the history and current developments of multimedia storytelling on the web, especially with regard to presentation strategies, knowledge transfer, and film-related concepts.

On Wednesday, the summer school will take place on the new premises of Bundesarchiv's film archive in Lichterfelde, which will be properly introduced to our participants. A guided tour through the famous film studios in Babelsberg will sweeten the conclusion of the event on Friday.

Instructors (Day 1 & 2)

Elżbieta Wysocka (opens enlarged image)

Elżbieta Wysocka

Elżbieta Wysocka currently works as a restorer at Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin. Previously she was working at the National Film Archive – Audiovisual Institute in Warsaw, Poland. There she has been responsible for digitisation projects and overseeing the Polish National Film Archive's digital collection (since 2010) and supervision of digitization and restoration of the film collection (since 2017). She also guided the development of the Media Asset Management at FINA and made digital workflow and their documentation efficient and interconnected with various departments. She accomplished her doctoral thesis on film and new media art restoration (2012). Passionate about bringing old media back to the audience.
Dr. Sarah Higgins (opens enlarged image)

Dr. Sarah Higgins

Dr. Sarah Higgins is a lecturer at Aberystwyth University Department of Information Studies, where she teaches across all programmes, and is Director of the MSc in Digital Information and Media Management. Her research, which won a Certificate of Distinction at the Digital Preservation Awards 2018, focuses on the lifecycle management of digital materials by archives services, libraries and other information professionals. She is currently working on an AHRC funded project to scope needs for a Trusted Digital Repository for Wales, and the Welsh Government Tyfu Dyfi a pilot project supporting and developing agroecology in the UNESCO Dyfi Biosphere Reserve.
Kieran O’Leary  (opens enlarged image)

Kieran O’Leary

Kieran O’Leary is the Digital Preservation Manager with the National Library of Ireland, currently working as part of a team that is developing workflows for ingesting born-digital objects, such as literary and photographic archives. He spent over seven years working in the IFI Irish Film Archive, initially working on 16mm and 35mm film, but eventually developing workflows and software for ingesting digitised and born digital material, such as Digital Cinema objects, broadcast material, and original camera material. He is interested in the full lifecycle of digital objects, with a particular interest in the implementation of open source tools, providing training, technical and preservation metadata, and writing customised scripts to perform a variety of ingest and pre-ingest preservation actions.
Etienne Marchand (opens enlarged image)

Etienne Marchand

Graduated from EICAR Paris in 2008 after a sound engineer training, Etienne Marchand has since been working on a great variety of archive documents - audio, video and film - and on every aspect of the technical workflows: assessment, physical restoration and cleaning; digitisation using manual and automatic processes; digital restoration and color grading; quality control; conversions and transcoding; media delivery; digital archiving. In 2015, Etienne joined INA, the curator of French public TV and radio archives, as a multimedia engineer and his current role includes working on strategies for handling digital media intake.

Instructors (Day 2 & 3)

Micky Lindlar (opens enlarged image)

Micky Lindlar

Micky Lindlar studied English, computer science and library and information science. Since 2009, Lindlar has been working in digital preservation, since 2012 at TIB - Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology. Active in nestor, the Open Preservation Foundation, the PREMIS Editorial Committee and several other national and international digital preservation networks, Lindlar was awarded the dpc Fellowship in 2020 in recognition of a significant and outstanding contribution to the preservation of digital heritage.
Barbara K. Fischer (opens enlarged image)

Barbara K. Fischer

The cultural manager Barbara K. Fischer works on the digital transformation of the GLAM sector. At Wikimedia Deutschland, she founded the hackathon Coding Da Vinci, among other things. As a member of the EUROPEANA Networkassociation, she is committed to capacity building and data literacy in the cultural heritage sector. She is involved in the opening of the Gemeinsame Normdatei (GND) at the Arbeitsstelle für Standardisierung an der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek and initiated the WikiLibrary Manifest. Her vision is to strengthen the Semantic Web through the application of standardised standards data in metadata of different domains. (March 2022)
Dr. Adelheid Heftberger (opens enlarged image)

Dr. Adelheid Heftberger

Dr. Adelheid Heftberger is deputy head of the Film Archive in the Bundesarchiv in Berlin. In the past, she worked as a researcher, curator, and archivist at Brandenburg Center für Media Studies in Potsdam and at the Austrian Filmmuseum in Vienna. She holds a PhD in Slavic Studies and obtained an Master degree in Comparative Literature from the universities of Innsbruck and Vienna. In 2016, she completed her M.A. of Library and Information Sciences at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She is head of the FIAF Cataloguing & Documentation Commission and actively supports the Open Science movement.
Paul Duchesne (opens enlarged image)

Paul Duchesne

Paul Duchesne is a software engineer with the Open Science Lab at the Technische Informationsbibliothek in Hannover, specialising in Wikibase and Linked Open Data for cultural data. He is an active member of the FIAF Linked Open Data Task Force, including contributing heavily to the forthcoming FIAFcore ontology for film archives.

Instructors (Day 3 & 4)

Oliver Hanley (opens enlarged image)

Oliver Hanley

Oliver Hanley is a film preservationist, curator and researcher. Since graduating from the University of Amsterdam's Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image professional M.A. programme in 2008, he has worked at the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin (2008-2011), the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna (2011-2016) and, most recently, the Film Heritage programme at the Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF in Potsdam (2016-2021). He is a member of FIAF's Programming and Access to Collections Commission (PACC) and curator of the Bonn International Silent Film Festival together with Eva Hielscher.
Dr. Claudy Op Den Kamp (Foto: Bournemouth University) (opens enlarged image)

Dr. Claudy Op Den Kamp

Dr. Claudy Op den Kamp is Principal Academic in Film, and faculty member at the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy & Management. During the 2022 Spring semester, she is a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. She holds a PhD (Art & Media) from the University of Plymouth on the relationship between copyright ownership, access to archival film, and film historiography. She is a graduate of the University of Amsterdam (Film & Television Studies) and the University of East Anglia (Film Archiving). She has worked as Haghefilm Conservation’s Account Manager; as a Film Restoration Project Leader at the Nederlands Filmmuseum, and as a senior research assistant in the DIASTOR project at the Department of Film Studies at the University of Zurich.
FSS Digital Archives | Jürgen Keiper  (opens enlarged image)

Jürgen Keiper

Jürgen Keiper works for Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum für Film und Fernsehen, where he is responsible (among other things) for the DFFB Archive website, the "Wir waren so frei" online archive as well as the conceptual and technological implementation of the RomArchive storytelling platform. He also focuses on research in the field of standardization and gives lectures on the subject of storytelling. Together with Chris Wahl, he hosts the blog Memento Movie. (Bild: Jürgen Keiper)
Prof. Dr. Giovanna Fossati (opens enlarged image)

Prof. Dr. Giovanna Fossati

Prof. Dr. Giovanna Fossati is the Chief Curator of Eye Filmmuseum and Professor of Film Heritage and Digital Film Culture at the University of Amsterdam. She recently led the research project The Sensory Moving Image Archive. Boosting Creative Reuse for Artistic Practice and Research and she is currently participating in the project Narratives from the long tail. Transforming access to audiovisual archives. She is the author of From Grain to Pixel (2009 and 2018 – revised edition), co-author of Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema (2015) and Exposing the Film Apparatus (2016), and co-editor of The Colour Fantastic (2018) and the special issue of The Moving Image journal on “Activating the Archive” (2021).

Application and participation

The Digital Archives summer school is directed at staff members of film-related archives and all persons who would like to enhance their knowledge and skills related to digital film archives.

Participants are asked to register online using our application form. Spots are limited and will be awarded based on registration date after assessment of the application and receipt of the participation fee.

The fee covers materials, lunches, and a dinner at the end of the event. Travel and accommodation expenses are not included and must be covered by participants. For our participants we have reserved a room contingent in nearby hotels. Please contact us if you are interested.

Covid-19

The course of the Covid 19 pandemic and the measures to restrict the virus remain uncertain. The protection of our participants and teachers is our highest priority. Depending on the pandemic situation and according to the guideline of the Brandenburg regulation for the containment of the coronavirus, the workshop will be adapted to the circumstances and a hygiene and workshop concept will be applied depending on the situation.

Participants will be informed regularly and in good time about the planning status by e-mail. We recommend travel and accommodation reservation with cancellation option.

FIAF Scholarship

The International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) kindly awards three scholarships that will cover the full participation fees. Travel and accommodation costs must be covered by the applicants themselves.

 

Please indicate in your application whether you are applying for a scholarship, and if so, for what reasons:

  • Why is it important for you to participate in the Digital Archives Summer School?
  • What impact will your participation in this training have on your institution or working environment?
  • Why do you need financial support?

Please submit your answers in English to summerschool(at)filmuniversitaet.de​​​​​​​. The application deadline for the FIAF scholarship is 29 May 2022.

If you would like to be kept regularly informed about the upcoming editions of the Digital Archive Summer School, please subscribe to our newsletter.

 

The Summer School "Digital Archives" is organised by the Filmuniversität Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF (Filmuni Summer School) in cooperation with the Bundesarchiv and the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek Berlin and with the support of the FIAF Cataloguing & Documentation Commission. It was conceived by Dr. Adelheid Heftberger, Jürgen Keiper and Prof. Dr. Chris Wahl.