Howard Besser (born c. 1952) is a scholar of digital preservation, digital libraries, and preservation of film and video. He is Professor of Cinema Studies and the founding director of the NYUMoving Image Archiving and Preservation Program ("MIAP"), a graduate program in the Tisch School.[1] Besser also worked as a Senior Scientist at New York University's Digital Library Initiative. He conducted extensive research in image databases, multimedia operation, digital library, and social and cultural influence of the latest Information Technology.[2] Besser is a prolific writer and speaker, and has consulted with many governments, educational institutions, and arts agencies on digital preservation matters. Besser researched libraries' new technology, archives, and museums.[3] Besser has been actively contributing at the international level to build metadata and upgrade the quality of the cultural heritage community. He predominantly, focused on image and multimedia databases;[4] digital library aspects (related to quality, intellectual property, and longevity); cultural and societal impacts of information technology, and developing new teaching methods through technology such as web-based instructions and distance learning.[5] Besser was closely involved in development of the Dublin Core and the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS), international standards within librarianship.[6]
Besser grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and earned a Bachelor's degree in 1976 from the University of California, Berkeley.[7] He studied film in Paris at the Centre Internationale d'Études des Cinema. He earned a Master's and PhD in Library Science in 1977 and 1988 respectively, both from UC Berkeley.[8]
Rick Prelinger (Prelinger Archives) and Howard Besser (NYU professor of cinema studies) answer the questions "What is an orphan film?" and "What is the Orphan Film Symposium?" (Recorded at the University of South Carolina, March 2006) running time 2:55
Besser was on the faculty of UC Berkeley's School of Information for a number of years, before accepting a position as professor at UCLA's School of Education and Information Studies in 1999.[7] The Department of Information Technology at the University of California began developing a project of the high-standard digital image. The project developers believed that the software (Image Query) served as a breakthrough in a multi-user digital image database. The user interface technology known as X Window System was the main feature of Image Query. The system could include various features such as point and click searching, GUI (Graphical user interface), and thumbnail. Drawing up this work, Besser worked on a major project named The Museum Site Licensing Project (MESL). It was a significant initiative to collect images alongside metadata from numerous cultural institutes and transformed them into digital technology for the users of university campus networks.[9] The project collaborated with seven universities, the Library of Congress, and six museums. The project delivered a dataset of almost ten thousand digital images and related metadata for classroom use. The research analyzed the requirements of implementors for working on digital imaging projects in universities.
Besser focused on integrating critical theory concepts and design issues.[2] He worked for several years to develop and test new ways for incorporating technology in teaching.[10] For the past twenty seven years, he has been using the internet as a significant component of instructional assistance, saving teaching materials and curriculum on the World Wide Web.
artwork for Occupy Wall Street movement
Contributions to Occupy Movement
One of Besser's many projects was in 2011 when he organized a group of librarians called the Activist Archivists who would record and document the famous Occupy Movement. [11] Graduates and students of the Moving Image Archives and Preservation Program acknowledged the importance of the Occupy Wall Street movement alongside the significance of the digital artifacts associated with the movement.[12] Under Besser's leadership, they developed the Activist Archivists and began planning on preserving the content.[13] The fundamental objective of this effort was to convey the digital preservation information effectively and concisely.[14] Besser's team articulated essential pieces of text and published them on postcards; they distributed those cards to the individuals in public places. In this way, they played their role in raising awareness about digital technology (Digital humanities). For example, "Why Archive" postcards contained information about accountability and archives as proof to hold people in power accountable.[15] The graduates and experts along with Besser, designed a crash course about digital preservations, supported by videos and links to materials for using video in the long term. Similarly, the course taught students the best practices that video activists can employ.
Man protesting with sign at Occupy Wall Street. 17 October 2011
Additionally, the course material included the details of legal restrictions in seeking permission from the people to record their activities; it also dealt with the copyright policy. The objective was to save the creators' original work from being stolen. The course emphasized the idea of obtaining a license that will enable the source to store the content and make it accessible for the long term. The Occupy movement had been recorded since its beginning in September 2011; in that regard, thousands of photos were taken, hundreds of people tweeted about it, and several recordings were available. However, creators expressed concern about saving this digital material.[16] At the time of the emergence of Activist Archivists, some suspicion surfaced. The movement had developed the archives of the working class, but it aimed to save the content of artifacts.[17] For example, the symbols carried by the protestors.
The archivists worked alongside New York University Tamiment Library to crowd-source the range of videos obtained from YouTube, relevant to the movement. Some categories were developed like Celebrity Visits and "Clashes with Police." The archivists asked movement members to complete an online form pointing at the five most interesting videos. According to Besser, "Tags (Unicode block)" was where metadata started. Plenty of educational material was made available about technical metadata with different illustrations.[18] To facilitate users, Besser worked with his team to develop an app for users' phones to fill the form, which could instantly record a things such as date, time, and Global Positioning System location and update it with video or photo.
Besser has always supported the idea of collection metadata right from the beginning when digital content was created.[2] He believed that getting the community members to develop metadata for sharing files over the internet may cause some components to be removed. The problem may arise at the time of downloading or uploading the files to the specific websites. Practically, with the app, Besser attempted to foster effective metadata practices within the community. According to Besser, the process needs automation. For institutions, ingestion of substantial amounts of digital work will be unlikely for memory institutions. Likewise, cultural institutions would not have the resources to integrate metadata and to collect enormous amounts of work added by the thousands of people.[19] The experiences of Archive Activists with the occupy movement depicts the situation of archivists in the future. The archivists will experience a large quantity of material contributed by users.
The archivists are likely to encounter inconsistency in data, and there will be a lack of guiding material with the organizational record. The efforts of Archivists Activists in the context of the Occupy movement describe the significance of the involvement of archivists in the initial phase of the event.[20] The archivists are the ones who uses their skills to impact the behavior of the content creator. Besser focuses on the outreach of the Activists Archivists; he indicated that his team members have taken up the small things, and they all worked with the locals. Besser also sponsored a session of the Association of Moving Image Archivists in December 2012 in which people discussed various dimensions of community archiving. Besser's team approached different locations that had collections and the team has attempted to create more sustainability in the field.
Besser is well known for his habit of wearing only t-shirts, and for maintaining a t-shirt database. A number of his classes used the t-shirt database as a cataloging and metadata practicum, cataloging t-shirts into the database with appropriate metadata.[6]
1 2 "Howard Besser", Digital Preservation Pioneers, Library of Congress (Interview, last visited Aug. 9, 2012)
1 2 National Research Council, Committee on Intellectual Property Rights in the Emerging Information Infrastructure, The Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Age (2000), pp. 254-255.
The Library of Congress National Digital Library Program (NDLP) is assembling a digital library of reproductions of primary source materials to support the study of the history and culture of the United States. Begun in 1995 after a five-year pilot project, the program began digitizing selected collections of Library of Congress archival materials that chronicle the nation's rich cultural heritage. In order to reproduce collections of books, pamphlets, motion pictures, manuscripts and sound recordings, the Library has created a wide array of digital entities: bitonal document images, grayscale and color pictorial images, digital video and audio, and searchable e-texts. To provide access to the reproductions, the project developed a range of descriptive elements: bibliographic records, finding aids, and introductory texts and programs, as well as indexing the full texts for certain types of content.
Digitization is the process of converting information into a digital format. The result is the representation of an object, image, sound, document, or signal obtained by generating a series of numbers that describe a discrete set of points or samples. The result is called digital representation or, more specifically, a digital image, for the object, and digital form, for the signal. In modern practice, the digitized data is in the form of binary numbers, which facilitates processing by digital computers and other operations, but digitizing simply means "the conversion of analog source material into a numerical format"; the decimal or any other number system can be used instead.
An archivist is an information professional who assesses, collects, organizes, preserves, maintains control over, and provides access to records and archives determined to have long-term value. The records maintained by an archivist can consist of a variety of forms, including letters, diaries, logs, other personal documents, government documents, sound and/or picture recordings, digital files, or other physical objects.
In library and archival science, digital preservation is a formal endeavor to ensure that digital information of continuing value remains accessible and usable. It involves planning, resource allocation, and application of preservation methods and technologies, and it combines policies, strategies and actions to ensure access to reformatted and "born-digital" content, regardless of the challenges of media failure and technological change. The goal of digital preservation is the accurate rendering of authenticated content over time. The Association for Library Collections and Technical Services Preservation and Reformatting Section of the American Library Association, defined digital preservation as combination of "policies, strategies and actions that ensure access to digital content over time." According to the Harrod's Librarian Glossary, digital preservation is the method of keeping digital material alive so that they remain usable as technological advances render original hardware and software specification obsolete.
Archival science, or archival studies, is the study and theory of building and curating archives, which are collections of documents, recordings and data storage devices.
The California Digital Library (CDL) was founded by the University of California in 1997. Under the leadership of then UC President Richard C. Atkinson, the CDL's original mission was to forge a better system for scholarly information management and improved support for teaching and research. In collaboration with the ten University of California Libraries and other partners, CDL assembled one of the world's largest digital research libraries. CDL facilitates the licensing of online materials and develops shared services used throughout the UC system. Building on the foundations of the Melvyl Catalog, CDL has developed one of the largest online library catalogs in the country and works in partnership with the UC campuses to bring the treasures of California's libraries, museums, and cultural heritage organizations to the world. CDL continues to explore how services such as digital curation, scholarly publishing, archiving and preservation support research throughout the information lifecycle.
Web archiving is the process of collecting portions of the World Wide Web to ensure the information is preserved in an archive for future researchers, historians, and the public. Web archivists typically employ web crawlers for automated capture due to the massive size and amount of information on the Web. The largest web archiving organization based on a bulk crawling approach is the Wayback Machine, which strives to maintain an archive of the entire Web.
In conservation, library and archival science, preservation is a set of preventive conservation activities aimed at prolonging the life of a record, book, or object while making as few changes as possible. Preservation activities vary widely and may include monitoring the condition of items, maintaining the temperature and humidity in collection storage areas, writing a plan in case of emergencies, digitizing items, writing relevant metadata, and increasing accessibility. Preservation, in this definition, is practiced in a library or an archive by a conservator, librarian, archivist, or other professional when they perceive a collection or record is in need of maintenance.
The conservation and restoration of new media art is the study and practice of techniques for sustaining new media art created using from materials such as digital, biological, performative, and other variable media.
Oral history preservation is the field that deals with the care and upkeep of oral history materials, whatever format they may be in. Oral history is a method of historical documentation, using interviews with living survivors of the time being investigated. Oral history often touches on topics scarcely touched on by written documents, and by doing so, fills in the gaps of records that make up early historical documents.
An orphan film is a motion picture work that has been abandoned by its owner or copyright holder. The term can also sometimes refer to any film that has suffered neglect.
Preservation metadata is item level information that describes the context and structure of a digital object. It provides background details pertaining to a digital object's provenance, authenticity, and environment. Preservation metadata, is a specific type of metadata that works to maintain a digital object's viability while ensuring continued access by providing contextual information, usage details, and rights.
Digital curation is the selection, preservation, maintenance, collection, and archiving of digital assets. Digital curation establishes, maintains, and adds value to repositories of digital data for present and future use. This is often accomplished by archivists, librarians, scientists, historians, and scholars. Enterprises are starting to use digital curation to improve the quality of information and data within their operational and strategic processes. Successful digital curation will mitigate digital obsolescence, keeping the information accessible to users indefinitely. Digital curation includes digital asset management, data curation, digital preservation, and electronic records management.
Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including:
A digital library, also called an online library, an internet library, a digital repository, a library without walls, or a digital collection, is an online database of digital objects that can include text, still images, audio, video, digital documents, or other digital media formats or a library accessible through the internet. Objects can consist of digitized content like print or photographs, as well as originally produced digital content like word processor files or social media posts. In addition to storing content, digital libraries provide means for organizing, searching, and retrieving the content contained in the collection. Digital libraries can vary immensely in size and scope, and can be maintained by individuals or organizations. The digital content may be stored locally, or accessed remotely via computer networks. These information retrieval systems are able to exchange information with each other through interoperability and sustainability.
Europeana is a web portal created by the European Union containing digitised cultural heritage collections of more than 3,000 institutions across Europe. It includes records of over 50 million cultural and scientific artefacts, brought together on a single platform and presented in a variety of ways relevant to modern users. The prototype for Europeana was the European Digital Library Network (EDLnet), launched in 2008.
Global Memory Net (GMNet) is a world digital library of cultural, historical, and heritage image collections. It is directed by Ching-chih Chen, Professor Emeritus of Simmons College, Boston, Massachusetts and supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s International Digital Library Program (IDLP). The goal of GMNet is to provide a global collaborative network that provides universal access to educational resources to a worldwide audience. GMNet provides multilingual and multimedia content and retrieval, as well as links directly to major resources, such as OCLC, Internet Archive, Million Book Project, and Google.
Smithsonian Libraries and Archives is an institutional archives and library system comprising 21 branch libraries serving the various Smithsonian Institution museums and research centers. The Libraries and Archives serve Smithsonian Institution staff as well as the scholarly community and general public with information and reference support. Its collections number nearly 3 million volumes including 50,000 rare books and manuscripts.
Digital Scriptorium (DS) is a non-profit, tax-exempt consortium of American libraries with collections of medieval and early modern manuscripts, that is, handwritten books made in the traditions of the world’s scribal cultures. The DS Catalog represents these manuscript collections in a web-based platform form building a national union catalog for teaching and scholarly research in medieval and early modern studies.
EUscreen is a website that provides free access to Europe's television heritage through videos, articles, images and audio from European audiovisual archives and broadcasters. Its digitised content covers a period from early 1900 until today. EUscreen "aligns the heterogeneous collections held throughout Europe and encourages the exploration of Europe's cultural and television history by different user groups". EUscreen is also the name of the overarching network of institutions working on providing access European audiovisual collections.
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