As a follow up to the previous day’s webinar on Disability Consciousness Raising, this session will provide a number of perspectives on actionable ways audiovisual archivists can better provide access to their collections and online, as well as to their physical spaces. Speakers will present on their work with automated closed captioning for digitized audiovisual collections, working with community members to collaboratively edit auto-generated captions, the challenges of building a sustainable, affordable product within the framework of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), and how to ensure both physical and digital archival spaces are accessible to all.
Panelists:
Moderator
Capacity is limited.
SPEAKER BIOS
Raphael Raphael is a film and media scholar whose work frequently looks at making connections between film and disability studies. His most recent book, Transnational Horror Cinema: Bodies of Excess and the Global Grotesque (link is external) (2017), with Sophia Siddique, looks at the intersections of the horror genre, disability and trauma across borders. Other writing includes Transnational Stardom: International Celebrity in Film and Popular Culture (2013) with Russell Meeuf and contributions to the Encyclopedia of American Disability History and writing on film and disability studies pedagogy in Modern Language Association’s Teaching Film (2012). He currently serves as Editor of the journal Review of Disability Studies. His scholarship is also informed by his own practice as a transmedia artist. Dr. Raphael tweets on issues in film, disability and technology @raphaelspeak.
Dr. Tom Conway is the Training and Instruction Coordinator at the Center on Disability Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. Dr. Conway is Co-PI of the Unidescription Project, funded by the National Park Service and Google, developing mobile technology to audio describe multimedia for individuals who are blind and visually impaired. He also served as the Project Director for EmployAble: A World Without Barriers, a virtual employment center for people with disabilities funded by the Kessler Foundation. With a background in design and media production, Dr. Conway is interested in accessible educational technology. He received his doctorate in Learning Design and Technology at the University of Hawaii in 2017. Dr. Conway developed a set of virtual tools in Second Life aimed at increasing postsecondary faculty and student awareness about access to technology for persons with disabilities.
Teague Schneiter (she/her) serves as the Sr. Manager of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Oral History Projects department, where she is responsible for new video productions and the acquisition of a collection of over 2,000 legacy interviews with filmmakers (1948-present). As the initiative’s founder, she has been responsible for strategic planning; developing born digital video production, research, description, metadata and access practices specific to oral history; collection development; digital preservation planning; curatorial projects; cross-institutional initiatives; and outreach. She has been involved in multiple grants projects, including co-developing an oral history project dedicated to documenting the stories of Latina/o/x and Latin American filmmakers which resulted in a richly searchable multilingual website using OHMS for the Getty’s 2017 PST:LA/LA cultural festival. Teague is a graduate of the University of Amsterdam’s moving image preservation program, and worked in the early part of her career with oral history, human rights and other cultural heritage materials in Australia, the Netherlands, Canada, and the United States with organizations such as WITNESS and IsumaTV. Since November 2016, Teague has served on the Board of AMIA, served as Vice President, and co-founded: AMIA’s CEA Task Force, ADIFP Fellowship Task Force, Advocacy Committee of the Board, and Oral History Committee. She is an active member of the Oral History Association’s Archives Interest Group and founder of a best practices collective with the craft guilds called the MICD Alliance.
Casey Davis Kaufman (she/her) is Associate Director of the GBH Archives and Project Manager for the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. In her role, Casey supports a team that includes a repository manager, web developers, and outreach staff to undertake collections management, fundraising, access, curatorial work, metadata management, engagement, and special projects. She was Project Director for the NEH-funded PBCore Development and Training Project and the IMLS-funded Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellowship, now sustained through a collaboration with the University of Alabama. She has served as GBH's AAPB project manager for the PBS NewsHour Digitization Project (CLIR), Riverside Church/WRVR-FM Digitization Project (CLIR), the Peabody Awards Digitization Project (NHPRC), and New Mexico Public Media and Kansas Public Media Digitization Projects (CLIR). She is currently managing a Mellon-funded project in collaboration with Brandeis University’s Lab for Computational Linguistics to develop CLAMS, an open-source platform and tools for automation of descriptive metadata and transcripts for audiovisual content. Casey has served on the AMIA Board of Directors (2017-2019) and co-founded AMIA’s CEA Task Force, ADIFP Fellowship Task Force, Advocacy Committee of the Board. She is also Co-Chair of the AMIA Oral History Committee.
Kimberly Tarr is the head of the media preservation unit in the Barbara Goldsmith Preservation & Conservation Department at New York University Libraries. In this role, she oversees preservation activities for all archival film, video, and audio collections. She received her B.A. in American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley and her M.A. from New York University's Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAP), a graduate program in which she has served as an adjunct instructor since 2012. Recent projects include the restoration of The Grim Game (1919), the first feature film to star Harry Houdini which was long thought to be a lost silent film. She served as the MIAP Faculty Associate Director from 2018-19.
Desi Alexander is the Audiovisual Collections Coordinator for Cornell University Library. She is currently heading a five year initiative to prioritize the library’s at-risk magnetic media for digitization and preservation, and continues to work toward developing sustainable workflows to make University content discoverable and accessible. She received her MSIS in Archival Studies at SUNY Albany.
Bertram Lyons (AVP) leads AVP's development team to create innovative, flexible, and user-center software for AVP's projects and clients. His background specializations include the acquisition, management, and preservation of documentary, research, and cultural heritage collections. Before joining AVP, Bert worked as an archivist for the Alan Lomax Archive and the American Folklife Center (AFC) at the Library of Congress. Over the years, Bertram has developed tools, policies, and partnerships around the management of analog and digital archival collections. Bert is active with professional archival organizations including the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (Executive Board Member and Editor of IASA publications), the Society of American Archivists (prior Council Member), and the Association of Recorded Sound Collections. He has also received certification from the Academy of Certified Archivists and is a graduate of the Archives Leadership Institute. He holds an MA in museum studies with a focus in American studies and archival theory from the University of Kansas.
Chloe McLaren is the Metadata Projects Librarian at Cornell University Library. She currently works broadly in the institutional repository and manages the library’s streaming video platform. Before becoming a librarian, she worked as a projectionist. She received her MLIS in 2010 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Jasmine Sykes-Kunk is a Reference Associate at NYU Special Collections and her primary work focuses on supporting managing researcher requests, student staff, and reading room workflows. Jasmine is a 2018 Spectrum Scholar and a 2018-2020 ARL/SAA Mosaic Fellow. She received her MSLS in 2019 from Clarion University.
Dr. Lydia Tang (Michigan State University) will discuss the SAA’s “Guidelines for Accessible Archives for People with Disabilities.” Dr. Lydia Tang is the Archivist of the Stephen O. Murray and Keelung Hong Special Collections at Michigan State University. Previously, she was an archivist at the Library of Congress and held numerous graduate positions at the University of Illinois, where she received her MLIS and Doctor of Musical Arts degree, including the American Library Association Archives, the Sousa Archives and Center for American Music, and the Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Passionate about accessibility and disability representation in archives, she spearheaded founding the Society of American Archivist’s (SAA) Accessibility & Disability Section and served on the Task Force to Revise Best Practices on Accessible Archives for People with Disabilities. She is the 2020 recipient of SAA’s Mark A. Greene Emerging Leader Award and was recognized in three SAA Council resolutions as a co-founder of the Archival Workers Emergency Fund, for spearheading the Accessibility & Disability Section’s “Archivists at Home: document, and for the “Guidelines for Accessible Archives for People with Disabilities.”