John Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries acquires the Academic Film Archive of North America

The Academic Film Archive of North America has found a new home at Johns Hopkins University. Comprising roughly 7,600 16mm academic films along with curricular materials and other ephemera, the collection spans the 1930s to the 1980s and includes a wide range of documentary, classroom, and lecture films in the subjects of history, art, social science, literature, and science. Filmmakers whose work can be found in the collection include John Barnes, Richard Leacock, Johanna Alemann and many others. JHU’s Sheridan Libraries plans to process the films for use by students, scholars, filmmakers, and its own Film and Media Studies program. Those who can’t make it to Baltimore can access digitized versions of over 400 films at the Internet Archive. For more on the collection’s move and future plans, see here.

WGN Radio audio materials donated to Northwestern Libraries

WGN, the AM Chicago radio station owned by the Chicago Tribune from 1924 to 2014, recently donated—via its parent company Nextar Media Group, Inc.—seventy years’ worth of its historical audio collection to Northwestern University’s Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections and University Archives. The multiformat collection, which includes open reel tape, compact cassettes, transcription discs, U-matic videocassettes, CDs, minidiscs, continuous-loop cartridges, and VHS tapes comprises over 15,000 items spanning 1941 to 2011 (bulk dates 1980-1990). Given WGN’s significance as a source of local and national news, popular talk and interview shows, cultural programming, and sports, the collection—once processed and preserved by library staff—will be an invaluable resource for scholars of broadcasting, journalism, and the cultural and political history of Chicago, the Midwest, and twentieth-century America. For more on the acquisition see here.

Jet and Ebony image archives acquired by the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Getty Research Institute

One of the most significant image collections documenting 20th-century Black life in America is under new care, with bright prospects for greater public access. After Johnson Publishing, the company that produced both Ebony and Jet, declared bankruptcy in 2019 it announced plans to auction off its historical image collections of photos and negatives capturing Black life, the Civil Rights Movement, and Black celebrity to private interests. In response, a consortium comprised of the Ford Foundation, the J. Paul Getty Trust, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Smithsonian Institution purchased the collection to ensure its availability to researchers and the public. With the support of $30 million from the Getty Institute, digitization of the collection is already underway, with National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) director Kevin Young estimating that an initial tranche of 90,000 images will be digitized and made available online via an interactive portal shared between the Getty and the NMAAHC this year. The full collection, which will also be available to researchers onsite at the NMAAHC in Washington, includes over 3 million photo negatives and slides, almost 1 million photographs, and some 9,000 moving image and audio recordings. For more on the significance of the collection for reshaping our understandings of twentieth-century life and the consortium’s ongoing efforts, see here and here.

150 years of Philadelphia Music History to be preserved by the University of Pennsylvania Libraries

The 1,000 linear feet of materials acquired by Penn document the founding and development of the Academy of Music and one of its longtime tenants, the Philadelphia Orchestra. The oldest U.S. opera house still used as a performance hall, the Academy of Music was completed in 1857 and served as the home of The Philadelphia Orchestra from its founding in 1900 until it moved to the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in 2001. Comprising administrative records, sound recordings for radio and other commercial use, concert programs, conductors’ files, photographs, ledgers, and other materials, the collection promises to provide significant insight into the inner workings of a major American orchestra that often sat at the forefront of experimentation with new recording and transmission technologies. Penn Libraries’ Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts estimates processing and partial digitization of the collection will take about four years. For more on the collection, see here.

Indiana University’s Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative Comes to a Close

Indiana University’s Media Digitization & Preservation Initiative (MDPI) comes to a successful conclusion after digitizing 236,396 audio recordings, 97,395 video recordings, and 23,821 reels of film across Indiana University’s more than 70 media-holding libraries, centers, and departments. Wax cylinder recordings of Native American Music, global ethnographic film, and speeches of important historical Indiana figures like Hoagy Carmichael and IU Chancellor Herman B. Wells are among the diverse materials preserved by the nearly seven-year project. The largest university-led media preservation initiative in the U.S., MDPI developed a partnership between the university and commercial archiving services to build new strategies and techniques in the digitization of time-based media. This included developing a unique post-processing system that automated the creation of embedded metadata, quality control, the creation of derivatives, and the creation of preservation packages for long-term storage. The more than 350,000 items will be made available via the Media Collections Online (MCO) service on the IU Libraries-developed Avalon Media System.  

Radio Preservation Task Force’s Sound Submissions Underway

Sound Submissions, developed by Radio Preservation Task Force (RPTF) of the Library of Congress (LOC) National Preservation Board, enables the longterm preservation of privately-held but nationally significant audio materials. The digital preservation initiative enables collection owners to retain their original physical media while digitized recordings and metadata are incorporated into the LOC’s National Audio-Visual Conservation Center’s collections for public access and use. One of the first collections to benefit from the project belongs to This Way Out, a 30-minute magazine-style radio show focused on LGBTQ issues airing nationally since 1988. Sound Submissions joins existing RPTF’s initiatives, including the Sound Collections Database, which allows users to search more than 3,000 radio collections online. For more on the ongoing activity of the RPTF, see here.

Computer History Museum Uses Machine Learning to Enhance Digital Collections

In a shift from cataloging the historic trajectory of artificial intelligence and its applications, The Computer History Museum (CHM) has started implementing AI to assist with processing their own archives. Thanks in part to a grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the CHM turned to the commercial machine learning product, Microsoft Cognitive Services (MCS), to quickly assign metadata to select objects in their digital media collections, beginning with a pilot project containing oral histories on the history of Xerox PARC and the history of AI. Their goal was to determine how machine learning can assist libraries, archives, and other cultural heritage institutions with large backlogs of inaccessible or unprocessed archival objects by automatically generating keywords for metadata, utilizing object recognition, face recognition, video transcription, and language translation. At the conclusion of the experiment, although many CHM staff evaluators were critical of the pilot project’s ability to generate high-quality metadata, external users were far more positive, deeming “machine generated metadata...better than no metadata.” Both groups, however, found extensive utility in the project’s automatic transcription of audio and video files. The CHM plans to use lessons learned from the pilot project to continue refining its use of AI and support the thoughtful development of machine learning practices for the museum and library space.

National Film Archive of India plans to preserve 5000 films

Following the completion of a controversial merger with the National Film Development Corporation in 2022, the National Film Archive of India (NFAI) will begin digitizing and restoring thousands of classic Indian films. Starting with the 1970 Indian Bengali drama, Pratidwandi, which screened at Cannes this past year, the initiative will restore 2,200 films and digitize a total of 5,000. In addition to film restoration and digitization, the undertaking will build the preservation capacities one of the largest film industries in the world through the construction of archives facilities and the development of preservation workshops and training for archivists. The NFAI was founded in 1964 by scholar and cinephile P. K. Nair, who passed away in 2016. The merger with the NFDC, which began in 2020, also incorporated three other publicly-funded organizations—the Films Division, the Directorate of Film Festivals, and the Children’s Film Society of India—into a single state-owned project.

Public domain day

With the new year on January 1st, 2023, works from 1927 have entered the public domain. Per copyright law in the United States, works made before January 1st, 1978 are held in copyright for 95 years. Other works now in the public domain include those from individuals who died in 1952 in countries with a copyright term of “life plus 70 years” (e.g., the UK, Russia, much of the EU and South America) and those who died in 1972 for countries with a copyright term of “life plus 50 years” (e.g., New Zealand, much of Africa and Asia). Works in the United States that are now in the public domain include the silent 1927 film, Wings, the first film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Barring further extension of copyright protections, The Artist, the only other (nearly!) silent film to win best picture, will enter the public domain in 2106. Tell your grandkids.

Victory for Fair Use Following Nintendo DMCA Takedowns

Nintendo, the longstanding Japanese videogame publisher, has a history of seeking out and asking for the removal of copyright content from the web. Over the past eight years alone the company has repeatedly sued emulation websites for copyright infringement , erased collections of out of print Nintendo Power magazine from the Internet Archive, taken down fan remakes of beloved games such as Metroid 2 and pulled Nintendo music from YouTube. The company’s aggressive moves to remove any traces of copyrighted material has highlighted the difficulties of preserving console-based videogame software, the importance of emulation projects, and the limits of fair use. The saga has even inspired its own game, “Fair Use Strikes Back.” 

In the latest installment of Nintendo’s many copyright battles, a YouTube creator DidYouKnowGaming has won an appeal to restore a video outlining the history of a 20-year old canceled Nintendo Game. A rare victory for fair use in the face of Nintendo litigiousness, restoring the video may set a precedent for fan-created videogame history preservation moving forward.

Scholar at the Library of Congress Identifies the First Motion Picture Ever Copyrighted

The first film to receive a copyright has been identified by film scholar Claudy Op den Kamp at the Library of Congress. Op den Kamp identified “The Blacksmith Shop,” a film by Thomas Edison, as the very first motion picture to be registered in 1893. While historians had known the date of the first registration for some time, the film it represented had long been uncertain. The delicate (and flammable) nitrate stock on which early films were made was prone to deterioration, making films difficult to store safely. As such, most films were registered using photographic contact paper prints. Op den Kamp came upon her discovery while she was searching through some 250 boxes of correspondence. 18 small photo strips tying Edison’s film to the copyright registration were tucked away in a November 14, 1893 letter to Edison from his head photographer, W. K. L. Dickson, who confirmed the originary status of “The Blacksmith Shop.”