Takeaways from AMIA 2013 Annual Conference
The 2013 AMIA (Association of Moving Image Archivists) Conference was another successful event, held appropriately in historical Richmond, Virginia. LAC Group was proud to be a Silver Sponsor, and it was a great opportunity for some of our people to get the latest on archiving and preservation of film and other media.
Tyler Leshney, EVP of Corporate Strategy and Development for LAC Group, participated in the event. He summarized his observations into five archival and preservation topics and trends.
Top 5 Trends in Digital and Physical Asset Management
- Film continues to be the best and most well-understood archival medium, but questions over its continued manufacture are growing. This concern now permeates every archival discussion.
- Digital Asset Management has become a part of every content owner’s vernacular, however many organizations still lack a deep understanding of what tools to choose and how to implement them.
- Digital and file-based acquisition is accelerating rapidly and creating new challenges for archivists as they face massive data sets and mountains of content, since there is no longer much consequence in shooting an indiscriminate amount of material.
- Because of this volume of content, the requirement to curate and cull media collections is becoming more important than ever. In addition, content owners are interested in using their content in differentiated ways, and of course, reducing storage costs.
- As collection owners attempt to better organize and monetize their content, the importance of metadata, contextual tagging and searchability continues to take center stage.
While he was unable to attend the event this year, Phil Spiegel, LAC’s Director of Digital Asset Management Projects, concurs with these assessments—“I’m happy that content curation and culling are getting more traction and couldn’t agree more with the importance of metadata in organizing digital assets for monetization.”
For more on metadata, you can read this brief case study on a meta-tagging project that entailed thousands of educational videos.
Tyler Leshney (LAC Group EVP of Corporate Strategy and Development) on the far left with Randy Gitsch (PRO-TEK Still Archives Manager) and Jim Harwood (PRO-TEK Operations Manager) at AMIA 2013.
Trend #6: Moving Images Are Moving to Other Industries
Tyler’s observations got me thinking about another trend—moving images are no longer the sole domain of entertainment and news media organizations. Thanks to digitization, we are seeing an explosion in the creation of moving images for training, web content, social media marketing, recruiting and other purposes. Now, organizations of all types and sizes have the growing need to preserve and archive moving images.
Moving image archival is an important business segment for LAC Group. We announced in October our acquisition of Kodak’s PRO-TEK Film Preservation Subsidiary. As a leader in archival storage, film inspection and repair, and library services for moving image and still photography content, PRO-TEK allows us to greatly enhance our preservation and archival services to corporations, law firms and government agencies. PRO-TEK’s vaults are considered the safest in the world.
Does your organization have growing media collection to manage? I invite you to learn more about our Digital Asset Management services.
Rob Corrao
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