The Association of Moving Image Archivists’ Digital Asset Symposium (DAS) returns to New York on June 6, presenting a full day of discussions sharply focused on today’s most compelling topics in asset management. The daylong event will take place once again at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). 

The power of DAS is in its real-world, case-study driven presentations that explore the many facets of the life-cycle of content – from collection and maintenance strategies to delivery with the purpose of reaching new, bigger audiences. The sessions are led by top experts in the field at work on important projects.

AMIA has announced its initial lineup of DAS presentations:

Presenters: Laura Michalchyshyn, Executive Producer; Rich Remsburg, Archival Producer; 

Elizabeth Wolff, Producer; and Joshua Pearson, Editor

Moderator: Matthew White, Executive Director, ACSIL and co-producer of The Beatles: Eight Days a Week

On April 25, a courageous team of filmmakers premiered their long-anticipated four-episode documentary series on a true giant of American history. The filmmakers explored a deep wilderness of archival media and found creative inspiration in the search itself. Bobby Kennedy for President is a stunningly important demonstration of archival storytelling and a true contribution to film preservation and the historical record. This special panel assembles at DAS on the day of RFK’s passing, 50 years after his assassination attempt on June 4. 

Presenters: Professor Lora Aroyo, VU University, Columbia Data Science/head of science at Tagasauris, Inc.; and Professor Dr. Chris Welty, senior research scientist at Google in New York, VU University

There is no single notion of truth, but rather a spectrum that has to account for context, opinions, perspectives and shades of grey. Media organizations looking to bridge the gap between their services and the needs of the users need to harness the full spectrum of truth and data is at the center of every process. Cultural heritage and media companies have traditionally been driven by expert professionals, following a top-down approach to offering content online. However, users and their media habits are a rich source of knowledge. This session explores how to harness, understand and integrate critical curation in the business models. 

Presenter: Dan Piro, Director of Digital Asset Archive, NHL

For the National Hockey League’s (NHL) Centennial Celebration, over 250,000 hours of audio/visual content, a half-million still images, and over a million documents had to be digitized and ingested, as well as merged with an existing archive of born-digital asset and new content being created daily. The new system made materials more accessible and allows the NHL to serve its internal departments and broadcast partners, improving licensing abilities and tying assets together around games or events. 

Presenter: Sally Hubbard, PBS, Metadata Architect

Organizations struggle with intelligently layering data science into their existing technological and informational ecosystem and its potential to partner it with information science domain technologies and activities- semantic tools or metadata schema and vocabulary development- and with enterprise information management (EIM) and data governance initiatives. The panel will bring more clarity to what data, metadata, data science, library and information science, analytics, semantics and other terms really mean, in what context, and how to smartly stack the domains together, examining the strengths and weaknesses of each – what kinds of problems each is the best match for; how one can support the other; and some of the particular issues faced when dealing with media content.

Presenters: Dr. Alain Dufaux, Head of Metamedia Center EPFL; Erik Weaver, Global Director, M&E Market Development, Western Digital (HGST)

In a two-part session exploring object storage and how it fits in to the expanding archive environment, using the Montreux Jazz Festival as a case study.  Since 1967, audiovisual recordings of the Montreux Jazz Festival, including many of the greatest musicians of the 20th century, have been made. The collection was inscribed on the 2013 UNESCO memory of the world register. Over 5,000 hours of ‘live’ concerts were recorded in state-of-the-art broadcast quality, of which a large part exists as multi-tracks. 

Presenter: Randa Minkarah, COO, Transform

In order to identify the levers that increase engagement and audience, content owners need to jump the chasm between analysis of their content and audience response. To accomplish this, they must face down a massive engineering hurdle, which existing solutions do not solve – too much disparate data in too many places; too little insight into the meaningful attributes of content; emergent media companies (Netflix and Amazon) building their content empires on top of powerful engineering. Learn how to bridge the gap and go from tons of data to real insight. 

Chair Nick Gold notes, “A media asset – which is essentially the core of what we are discussing - is incredibly significant. It becomes part of the human story and crucial in the hands of the storyteller. The work that we will be discussing at DAS brings together not just the elements of these incredible stories, but just as importantly, the story of how we work on them – how they are maintained, how they are shared, how they are managed, and how they can be promoted to tell important stories. 

Our work connects communities, preserves legacies, and challenges perceptions. These assets have a huge purpose, and it is our goal to recognize and promote it as well as those who work on them.”

The Symposium kicks off at 9:00 a.m., and continues until 5:00 p.m., when a cocktail reception begins. 

Dennis Doros, President of AMIA, notes, “Thanks to Nick Gold and his curatorial team, this year’s DAS presentations are as diverse as Robert Kennedy, the National Hockey League and the Montreux Jazz Festival, while ranging from technological advancements to highly relevant social topics. Yet there is a commonality in the case studies: how do we as individuals or part of an organization approach the challenges and opportunities in today’s digital asset milieu? AMIA is the only place with a sharp and intense focus on preserving, managing and making accessible an astonishingly wide variety of moving image assets, that are increasing exponentially every day, across a wide variety of disciplines. Now is the time to tackle these technological, pragmatic and ethical questions and harness the tools at our disposal. DAS gives our community the essential forum to explore topics and technologies that are critical to the preservation and access to our moving image heritage.” 

For more information or to register for DAS, for more information, and for bios and headshots of the speakers, visit http://www.digitalassetsymposium.com.