ARSC's 56th Annual Conference and Pre-Conference Workshop will be hosted virtually, 17-21 May 2022!

The virtual conference will include live presentations in an online conference platform and recorded presentations made available for on-demand viewing in ARSC's Aviary Site.

The Program Committee has selected Detroit, Michigan as our virtual host city and welcomes proposals for presentations, panels, and posters on any aspect of sound recording, especially those relating to Detroit and the Midwest region of the United States.

Since the online platform also offers opportunities for global participation, we invite sound recording scholars, collectors, preservationists, and creators to engage in a broad range of topics that cross geographic, cultural, and collection boundaries.

Preliminary Conference Program [pdf]

Conference website: https://www.arsc-audio.org/conference.html

Implementation of automation tools based on machine learning and artificial intelligence, what future does AI hold for audiovisual librarians, what role can they play and how to manage such a big change? In 2015, to deal with the challenges raised by the massification of digital data, INA has embarked on a vast project to completely overhaul its information systems.

Embracing a data centric strategy, this overhaul meets the necessary conditions for the implementation of automation tools based on machine learning and artificial intelligence to segment and describe audiovisual content. After identifying a few use cases, the works to automate segmentation and indexing media process was launch in 2019. These technical and material issues come with human and professional challenges, asking for specific business user’s skills and knowledges.

This presentation aims to give a few answers, at least advices and feedbacks, to a simple question: what future does AI hold for audiovisual librarians, what role can they play and how to manage such a big change?

Regional Languages with Machine Learning: Achievements and Challenges (small languages and dialects). Radiotelevisiun Svizra Rumantscha (RTR, SRG SSR) has launched a project for the written reproduction of spoken Romansh: The Romansh media company Radiotelevisiun Svizra Rumantscha (RTR, SRG SSR) has launched a project for the written reproduction of spoken Romansh. In order to be able to teach Romansh to the computer at all, RTR first had to acquire data to feed the system to learn Romansh. Bernard Bearth, Head of Data and Archives at RTR, explains the value of the existing archives for this project and the importance of speech to text and automatic translation for RTR archives in the future.

Regional Languages with Machine Learning: Achievements and Challenges University of Edinburgh : Gaelic Speech Recognition: Challenges Faced, Lessons Learnt and Future Plans: In this seminar, Dr Will Lamb (University of Edinburgh) will discuss work towards an accurate, general purpose Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system for Scottish Gaelic. In 2021, a team of researchers at Edinburgh developed the first working example of such as system, with assistance from MG Alba and several other non-academic partners. By the end of the project, the system achieved an accuracy level of approximately 73%. While this is a far cry from state-of-the-art English systems, used in applications such as Siri and Alexa, it is a promising beginning and confirms the methodology adopted. Modern ASR systems are machine-learning based, and trained upon tens of thousands, if not millions, of hours of audio and corresponding text. The principal challenge facing minority languages, such as Gaelic, is acquiring suitable training data. In this seminar, Dr Lamb will outline plans to augment the current 103 hours of data fiftyfold (i.e. to 5000 hours). This increase would translate to a much more accurate and robust system. The goal is to develop a subtitling system appropriate for broadcasting purposes in the next 3 to 4 years.

Metadata wrangling at VRT wtih Tinkerlist: Managing metadata during TV production can be a very tedious and repetitive task — from manually uploading clips and adding numerous details (like names of the producers, creation dates, file types, etc.) to archiving them and hoping that one day you’ll be able to easily search and retrieve those clips.

Luckily, this no longer has to be the case. With TinkerList, production teams at broadcasting companies like VRT can automatically save and store metadata by simply uploading clips when they create scripts and rundowns, and entering the required details just once. The rest is archived and ready to retrieve in TinkerList’s database.

How exactly does it work and what else can TinkerList turn from ‘annoying’ to ‘automated’? Find out on the 26th of May during our talk with Erik Hauters and Aaron Nuytemans from TinkerList!

Cloud-based media supply chains: integration and evolution: The cloud has continued to rapidly evolve to support media workflows, including the distribution and monetization of content archives. This presentation will cover some recent updates to major cloud-based services relevant for media workflows since the last MMC Seminar in 2019, as well as some high-level strategy for turning archival focused media workflows into active media supply chains to support content reuse.

The Archvisit: The Impact of of AI /Machine Learning and the Pandemic on their Role: A wrap up and discussion focusing on if we can see a change of the archivist role in the context of AI /Machine Learning and the Pandemic. The discussion starts with an introduced from the perspectives that MMC has predicted and presented at the MMC Seminar in Stockholm 2019.

The FOCAL International Awards, which are heading into their 19th year, celebrates the achievements in the use of footage across a variety of genres and media platforms. The Awards also recognise the exceptional work of the archive researchers, archive producers and the accomplishments in the restoration work of film and television. 

Submissions for the FOCAL Awards 2022 Production, Jane Mercer Researcher of the Year and Restoration & Preservation Categories are now openis now open.

Enter now: entry.focalintawards.org

With the pandemic causing the FOCAL Awards to be hosted and streamed virtually over the last two years, we are delighted to announce that the FOCAL International Awards 2022 will be a live event in London, further details will be available shortly. 

It has been a fervent hope of everyone that we would be able to meet in person in 2022. However, with the continued development of the pandemic situation, bringing with it evolving travel restrictions and differing quarantine protocols, the SEAPAVAA concluded that it is prudent and realistic for SEAPAVAA’s 26th Conference to be held virtually from 19 – 21 July 2022.

The 2022 SEAPAVAA Conference was scheduled to be held in the Pacific. As such, the virtual conference will have a special focus on issues and challenges faced by Pacific members. Specific details relating to the virtual conference will be shared in early 2022.
SEAPAVAA’s 26th General Assembly (GA) will be held electronically from 2 – 31 May 2022. The details will be available on the website in due course.

We also invite you to check out SEAPAVAA’s YouTube Channel where you can access recordings of the virtual 25th Conference sessions. Recordings of future conferences will be uploaded on the SEAPAVAA YouTube Channel for greater accessibility.
We hope to see SEAPAVAA members and colleagues at next year’s virtual Conference and look forward to your participation in the e-GA.

The Executive Board is happy to announce the 2022 conference will be held at the National Phonotheque of Mexico and the Institute for Research in Librarianship and Information (IIBI) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM),  26-29 September. 

In line with the theme for 2022, attendees will be able to participate in significant portions of the conference remotely to provide access to those who are not able to attend in person. We are hopeful that the pandemic will subside sufficiently to allow a safe in-person conference, though changes to the conference format might be unavoidable if the epidemiological situation does not improve. More details to come as we gather them.

The title of this year’s FIAT/IFTA conference is “Archive out of the box!”. We welcome proposals based on user experiences, new initiatives or perspectives, striking conclusions, successes but also failures. The main objective is for audiovisual archive professionals to share among each other to understand the lessons learned and new challenges or solutions arising from entering into new partnerships, launching new ideas, wherever your archive is on the timeline. Suggestions for subjects not mentioned are equally welcome but should be contextualised thoroughly.

This is why the 2022 FIAT/IFTA World Conference programme features the following chapters:

The archive: an active member of society
Catering to the basics
Influencers of technological innovation
What makes you special