Digital Preservation, Spring 2016

Bit Faker Productions: Organizing Chaos and Entering the Digital Unknown

Tiffany Naiman (musicology), Taylor Morales

Bit Faker Productions is media production and distribution consultancy company dedicated to the creation of compelling narratives and visual content for the entertainment industry. Over the years the company has accumulated over five hundred screener and master copies of rare independent films spanning the booming era of independent cinema of the 1990s and early 2000s. The collection is mainly housed on VHS, DVD, and Betacam. Bit Faker also holds a collection of original concert footage spanning the years 2003 -- 2016, with over 680 events represented including footage of little know musicians in coffee houses and bars to artist performing at some of the largest music festivals in the world such as Coachella, Hard LA, Glastonbury, and SxSW.

Crawling UCLA's Web Archives: Capturing Issues and Making Recommendations that 'WARC'

Rebecca Fordon, Dvorah Lewis, Niqui O'Neill

Some say the 'web is forever,' but the reality is far from it. Due to censorship, spotty funding, and fluidity of content, the web and its contents are at risk of vanishing. UCLA's Collections, Research, and Instructional Services (CRIS) works to document everything from political dissent in Russia to transient political movements or campaigns. ! Our goal is to analyze current workflow and procedures to provide CRIS with a strategy to meet their objectives in preserving the web, making it accessible to users, and encouraging other departments across campus to join the initiative. Along with suggesting components of a digital preservation strategy, we aim to identify risks and costs of the current system and suggest recommendations to mitigate problem areas.

Digital Preservation on Small Scale: The Velaslavasay Paronama

Jonathan Ballak, Emily Coxe, and Jade Finlinson

The Velaslavasay is a non-profit exhibition hall, theatre, and garden in Los Angeles dedicated to the production and the presentation of unusual visual experiences and speciality events, including 360-degrees immersive environments and illustrated lectures on art and historical subjects. As a small organization with limited resources and employees, the Velaslavasay balances the ability to institute preservation standards appropriate for businesses and methods on scale with personal archiving. Our assessment of the Velaslavasay options for short- and long-term storage are based on balancing its present needs with the costs of creating and mantaining a system that is practical and flexible enough to be expanded upon the future.

Kip Holcomb, Mary Priest

Warner Music Group became increasingly aware of the perils of long-term preservation when dealing with the loss of audio recording assets. Several fires and a few cases of neglect meant the destruction many irreplaceable items. These casualties prompted a closer consideration of how to digitally capture their existing audio content and how to maintain several redundant copies for protection against loss.