2 Replies to ““What’s Next?” Maryland Public Television”
Nice work. I think your project nicely illustrates how complicated this kind of thing can get when there are so many different organizational elements involved. That is, on some level, since the content is AAPB bound, it’s possible to check all the boxes and just say that LC is covering it. At the same time, the services that the library provides are also potentially covering most of these requirements too.
Great point about how having particularly high sets of requirements for managing and digitizing the content is creating a potential preservation threat to the content itself. Since the only way for this AV content to be preserved into the future is for it to be digitized there are some very challenging tradeoffs to work through. In that vein, the “digitize first metadata later” approach you are suggesting makes a lot of sense. It would, however, likely create its own big challenges in terms of data storage at that point as the scale of what they get back in terms of file size may well be a stress test for the infrastructure and storage systems that the university is putting in place.
Great point about the data storage– I anticipate that, even with some digitization happening in house, the process would still be slow enough for UMD to adjust the infrastructure as they went, but it would certainly be a concern, due to the size of the files. Should the process of digitizing the video files prove to be less costly (in terms of time by works or money for for vendors), this question would definitely come up again.
Something this makes me consider is potentially the choice of materials to digitize– currently, they’re being digitized by accession, which means that items that are often from roughly the same time and program are being digitized together. This is certainly neater, but perhaps at some point in this process, it might be worthwhile to prioritize digitizing one video from each accession– this could potentially grab the attention of a wider number of users (researchers studying different eras, fans of different programs, etc) and the increased attention could lead to more institutional support, or more volunteers to help process the collection. This might be an option also if storage becomes a real issue, and the digital holdings could be filled out as more storage is available.
Nice work. I think your project nicely illustrates how complicated this kind of thing can get when there are so many different organizational elements involved. That is, on some level, since the content is AAPB bound, it’s possible to check all the boxes and just say that LC is covering it. At the same time, the services that the library provides are also potentially covering most of these requirements too.
Great point about how having particularly high sets of requirements for managing and digitizing the content is creating a potential preservation threat to the content itself. Since the only way for this AV content to be preserved into the future is for it to be digitized there are some very challenging tradeoffs to work through. In that vein, the “digitize first metadata later” approach you are suggesting makes a lot of sense. It would, however, likely create its own big challenges in terms of data storage at that point as the scale of what they get back in terms of file size may well be a stress test for the infrastructure and storage systems that the university is putting in place.
Great point about the data storage– I anticipate that, even with some digitization happening in house, the process would still be slow enough for UMD to adjust the infrastructure as they went, but it would certainly be a concern, due to the size of the files. Should the process of digitizing the video files prove to be less costly (in terms of time by works or money for for vendors), this question would definitely come up again.
Something this makes me consider is potentially the choice of materials to digitize– currently, they’re being digitized by accession, which means that items that are often from roughly the same time and program are being digitized together. This is certainly neater, but perhaps at some point in this process, it might be worthwhile to prioritize digitizing one video from each accession– this could potentially grab the attention of a wider number of users (researchers studying different eras, fans of different programs, etc) and the increased attention could lead to more institutional support, or more volunteers to help process the collection. This might be an option also if storage becomes a real issue, and the digital holdings could be filled out as more storage is available.