Man, I am SO EXCITED RIGHT NOW. Excited in a way that only happens once a year.

It is finally time for the event that I wait all year for and have been attending since before I started school to become a moving image archivist: the annual AMIA Conference, and this year it’s taking place in Savannah, GA. I am looking forward to having an authentic mint julep and exploring southern hospitality. You know how archival personalities are!

My first year going to AMIA was in Philadelphia in 2010. I went in order to decide if moving image archive work was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. It is now 2014. I had an absolute blast in Austin, Seattle was wonderful, Richmond rocked and I’m heading to Savannah this Sunday, October 5th. I think you could say I’ve decided.

One of my heroines in the field, Maxine Fleckner Ducey. Last year she retired but she is one of my total rock stars and ALWAYS will be! Would never have gotten to meet her if it wasn’t for AMIA. Richmond, VA

Every year I do the same errands in preparation. It works out pretty well. I get my “I’m forgetting something” anxiety while packing, get on the plane, and am fine once we take off.

This time, however, I decided to add something new to the mix.  I wanted it to be different. AMIA has given me so very much. I felt like I really wanted to provide the conference and/or its attendees with something before I even arrived. I started to think about the fact that AMIA does a lot for the moving image archiving world by having these events and many of us are ardently doing our own bits by communicating all year long on the internet through social media. What if we connected these two things in a more organized fashion?

AMIA TRIVIA THROWDOWN.
Seriously. If you don’t go to this? I’m not sure you believe in fun.

Pre-Gaming

I decided that I wanted to catalog as many of the people who would be interacting with the information being disseminated as possible. Or at least as many as would respond to the call that I made on the AMIA-list, the Facebook invite, and my twitter feed.

I wanted to create a central location before the conference began where people could come and locate social media sources and feel more prepared pre-conference. Clearly, my real dream would be to initiate some kind of venture starting more than a few days previous and give everyone a nice spreadsheet to follow, but for the moment, my blog will have to do. I hope that it will suffice for the time being!

So I would like to introduce you to something that I have affectionately nicknamed social media “hors d’oeuvres.” Seeing as the main course is clearly the conference itself, this aggregation of archivists, vendors, individuals, educators and generally fantastic people who responded to my call for social media info is the nice tasty bit of delicious everyone snacks on before jumping into the “meat and potatoes” of #AMIA14 (or for vegans & vegetarians, some high-protein equivalent).

Before I list these lovely folks who have so generously responded and provided such positive feedback to this idea, I want to briefly discuss why I think having this list is critical and what it will allow and generate.

During last year’s AMIA conference, I got to tour the LOC. The Packard Campus. Need I say more?? AMIA RULES!!! Richmond, VA, 2013

I began to consider the many ways in which I have utilized social media. When I served as the AMIA Student Chapter President at UCLA, I spent each morning on the way to school tweeting new articles about archiving and data asset management, women in restoration, orphan films, preservation technology and digital workflows on the @AMIAatUCLA twitter account. I created this account for the Student Chapter hoping that it would serve as an important avenue for future outreach and training for students in the field. The time I spent in grad school culling meaningful materials/information from the internet and sharing it with the rest of the community in an expedient fashion is probably one of the most useful tools that I acquired in those two years. I still use this skill everyday, whether I am sharing this information on my personal social media or in my current position working for the Film Noir Foundation.

In the few short years since I began to attend AMIA events, social media and its applications have reached incredible heights. Those who continually post memes, wrongly identified Oscar Wilde quotes and gossip articles on their Facebook are likely highly unaware of the power that they actually hold in their clicking hand. Indeed, the recent announcement of the newly discovered lost Sherlock Holmes film was shared repeatedly by people I never thought I would see it shared by. Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr and the various Vine/Snapchat-style moving image capture devices? All of these have the possibility for achieving and spreading great information. And we are in the business of information, be it visual or otherwise. My point: as keyed-in, aware folks, let’s exploit the possibilities of social media applications in order to further strengthen our own community and spread more awareness about what we REALLY DO.

Let’s start with #AMIA14. Let’s get people who have never heard of  our field or AMIA to become interested because a cadre of us tweet interesting and archivally-centered comments about Ian MacKaye’s keynote address. I’m totally into the idea of young punk rock kids asking questions about scanning and document preservation. Doesn’t that sound amazing???

Let’s talk about HASHTAGS. And let’s get standardized NOW.

So let’s get real. While attending various AMIA-related events (DAS, The Reel Thing, AMIA conference) one thing always struck me: “social media confusion” reigned supreme in a population that is centered on the organization of media.

Let’s be clear: I am not at all blaming or badmouthing anyone. As stated earlier, the way in which social media has shifted has been incredibly fast; sometimes much too fast for people to keep up with and be on the regular “battlefield” so to speak. But as of now, we can no longer afford that luxury. So let’s play catch-up.

In these situations, the primary issue hinged upon the fact that barely anyone was aware of who else was tweeting/instagramming/etc, unless they were personal friends or colleagues. While this is great for connected friendly folks, this neglects newcomers to the field (students, new hires to companies, etc) and is rather exclusive. Right here we have lost a unique opportunity for increased social media connectivity and a surefire way to build a stronger more cohesive community.

Unfortunately, most people who were using social media were either not using hashtags, making up their own or unaware of what the official one was. To me, this was quite problematic. While I think there is something valuable to a more folksonomic approach to certain social media hashtags, I strongly believe that in a situation such as #AMIA14 or any other AMIA-related event, it is critical to set one term to be used throughout the session. That way, whether you know or are aware of other folks using social media, you can explore all that is tagged with that term and get a decent idea of the panels and conference. More critically, if you are unable to attend, having a standardized hashtag allows people to investigate the conference on an international level.

STANDARDIZATION IS ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL IN WHAT WE DO. IT CANNOT BE STRESSED ENOUGH.

THEREFORE, OUR HASHTAG FOR THIS CONFERENCE IS #AMIA14. PLEASE USE #AMIA14 as the “official hashtag”

If you are attending the REEL THING EVENT please use #TRTxxxiv , if you are attending Hack Day, please use #AVhack14

Any other hashtags are up to you, clearly. But as long as we have those, some kid who is studying cataloging in Iowa and couldn’t afford to come can still follow a little bit of the conference on their iPhone, see how much fun we’re having, and say to herself, “Dang. I’m totally gonna get a second job during Christmas. No WAY I’m missing this AMIA thing next year!!”

Hors d’Oeuvres

And with that, I am most pleased and incredibly honored to introduce you to the wonderfully consume-able social media treats that will be interacting with and commenting on #AMIA14. I strongly encourage any and all of you to check them out and, if you are in Savannah, find them in person and say hello as well! I know some of my best AMIA experiences have come from a simple, “Hey, I loved that question,” during a panel. You might be able to say the same about an Instagram or a tweet!

So, please add all of these  to your tabletphonethingies.

AMIA

AMIA-L /AMIA-Member listservs  – Please note that there will be messages going out on these during the conference!

AMIA Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Association-of-Moving-Image-Archivists

AMIA Twitter: https://twitter.com/AMIAnet

AMIA YouTube: AMIAstreaming: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClaGeGA_4nY_UFMdwhpmC8g

AMIA Instagram: AMIARCHIVISTS

AMIA Education Committee: https://twitter.com/AMIAEduComm
http://amiaeducomm.wordpress.com/category/announcements/
https://www.facebook.com/AmiaEducationComittee

RICK PRELINGER – Meta-archivist; home movie collector; co-founder outsider library; makes live historical film events; teaches Film&DigitalMedia at UCSC. –

@Footage – Twitter

KRISTIN LIPSKA – Project Assistant at the California Audiovisual Preservation Project (also on twitter as @CAVPP). CAVPP is a project to digitize and provide access to AV recordings found in various California libraries and archives. Everything is online here: https://archive.org/details/californialightandsound

@snaile – Twitter

SUE BIGELOW  – will be tweeting for the Vancouver Archives – Vancouver’s City Archives. History, public access, preservation, open data. Documents, photographs, movies, audio, maps, plans, digital records.

@VanArchives – Twitter

BRITTAN DUNHAM – heads up a private archive, on the Film Advocacy Task Force, Co-Chair of the Projection and Technical Presentation Committee, and helps produce Archival Screening Night

@brittanclaire – Twitter

@brittanclaire – Instagram

SNOWDEN BECKER – Snowden Becker is Program Manager for the MIAS program at UCLA. A co-founder of the international Home Movie Day event and the nonprofit Center for Home Movies, she is also Secretary of the Board of the Association of Moving Image Archivists. She will be tweeting at her own account and for the official MIAS program account.

@snowdenbecker – Twitter

@UCLAmias

CRAWFORD MEDIA SERVICES – a media management house based in Atlanta, GA, providing media migration, archival storage, asset management and metadata services. The folks who will be attending the conference will be Emily Halevy, Jeff Britt, Steve Davis, Corinne Whitney and Robin Rutledge.

@crawford_media #crawford_media – Twitter

https://www.facebook.com/crawfordmediaservices – Facebook

Emily Halevy from Crawford will also be creating social media on her own accounts:

@johanoomen – Twitter

Also associated:

WGBH TWITTER LINKS

@wgbharchives preserves and makes accessible the unique and historically important content produced by the public television and radio station WGBH in Boston.

@amarchivepub is the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, a collaboration between WGBH and the Library of Congress to preserve and make accessible the historical record of public media across America.

@caseyedavis1 is the Project Manager for the American Archive of Public Broadcasting at WGBH and chairs the AMIA PBCore Advisory Subcommittee

@kcariani is the Director of the WGBH Media Library and Archives and is Project Director for the American Archive of Public Broadcasting at WGBH.

@therealpbcore a metadata schema for audiovisual media. Tweets from the AMIA PBCore Advisory Subcommittee.

POST HASTE DIGITAL – Established in 2003 by Allan Falk and Jim Allan. Post Haste Digital has grown to provide multiple premier post production services all while maintaining the original core value of providing high level technical servicing coupled with a full range of customer service and support. We offer tailored services in restoration, preservation, mastering and archival among much more.

ANDY UHRICH – from the Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive.

@iulmia – Twitter

RETO KROMER – AV Conservation and Restoration Scientist ~ mathematician ~ musician ~ bon vivant ~@AVpres by @retoch ~ Currently on @AMIAnet Board of Directors

@RetoKromer – Twitter

GRACE LILE – Human rights archivist, Palestine solidarity activist, WITNESS lifer.

@gracelile – Twitter

THE PIXEL FARM LTD – We manufacture and market innovative image-processing technologies. Creators of PFTrack, PFDepth and PFClean

@thepixelfarm – Twitter

AUDIOVISUAL PRESERVATION SOLUTIONS (AVPS) – a consulting firm that supports organizations in media archiving, data management, and development of related software to help them better manage, distribute, and preserve their assets

The AVPS Team & their Twitter handles!

@avpreserve

@avpseth – Seth Anderson

@k_grons – Kathryn Gronsbell

@kvanmalssen – Kara Van Malssen – Senior consultant for all things digital preservation & access @AVPreserve and Adjunct Professor for @NYUMIAP teaching digital preservation.

ASHLEY BLEWER – Developer, archivist. Moving image specialist, enthusiast. Music, movies, microcode.

@ablwr – Twitter

LORENA RAMIREZ-LOPEZ – current student at the NYU program for Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAP) and is interested in working on digital preservation for Latin American archives.

MEDIA COMMONS ARCHIVE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO– Rachel E. Beattie will be tweeting/ posting on facebook for the Media Commons Archive at the University of Toronto.  The Media Commons is the media library and archives at Robarts Library at the University of Toronto. We offer a lending collection of film and television; microfilm and microfiche; and an audio visual archive specializing in Canadian cultural production.

http://www.facebook.com/uoftmediacommons – Facebook

@MediaCommons_TO – Twitter

SHIRA PELTZMAN – Shira was recently chosen for the National Digital Stewardship Residency hosted by the Carnegie Hall Archives. As such, she will design and document workflows for the acquisition, storage, and long-term management of born-digital assets, configure and implement Carnegie Hall’s new Digital Asset Management System, and use inventories of born-digital assets to inform requirements and recommendations for the long-term preservation and sustainability of digital files.

@shirapeltzman – Twitter

KRISTIN MACDONOUGH – Digitization Specialist | Video Data Bank, AV Artifact Atlas Coordinator | Bay Area Video Coalition

ARIEL SCHUDSON – Moving image archivist. Here to curate media, celebrate moving image preservation & archival communities, and just sorta rock out. All words/opinions my own. Also recipient of the Nancy Mysel Legacy Project award from the Film Noir Foundation.

@sinaphile – Twitter

will also be posting to the Film Noir Foundation Tumblr, which can be found here: http://filmnoirfoundation.tumblr.com/