KCA Spring 2008

The Spring Kentucky Council on Archives meeting was held at Appalshop in Whitesburg, KY. It was a long, rainy drive but beautiful.

There were three speakers for this meeting:

• Caroline Rubens of Appalshop: To Fit Our Own Category: Preservation of 35 Years of Appalshop Audio Recordings
• Robert Gipe of Southeast Community and Technical College: Higher Ground: The Role of Self-documentation in the Preservation of Community Identity
• Dwight Swanson formerly of Appalshop: Film Preservation at Appalshop: Funding and Process

Caroline's talk centered around the processes related to preserving some of Appalshop's earliest recordings. Most of their work was made possible through grants and they reformatted audio materials three different ways:

1. Inhouse
2. With a small production company
3. Using a large company with conservation abilities

They decided to work with the finished products rather than the raw sound files as the finished audio that had been sold was the closest to the artist's original vision for the music.

Caroline gave pros and cons for each experience, but the end result was that they would use the professional conservator for audio that they planned on selling. Other audio would be done inhouse with their equipment and Adobe Audition for digitization.

Some other interesting items were that they used a food dehydrator for baking tapes with sticky tape syndrome. They were using LTO Data tapes for long term offsite storage rather than a server or external hard drive.

Robert Gipe is the head of Appalachian Studies at Southeast Community College and talked about his project in using art to document the community. They focused on photography, community theater and tile mosaic murals. The photography combined photographs with oral history which was then turned into several tile mosaics and a play. The "If These Hills Could Talk" mosaic is awesome. The tiles making up the hills are stamped with letters and make up quotes from the oral history project.

Last was Dwight Swanson talking about film preservation projects at Appalshop. All their projects were funded through grants from the National Film Preservation Foundation(NFPF). The earliest grants were to have older films preserved and put on new 16mm film. Later grants have included digitization of films as well. The NFPF site gives a list of labs that can do the preservation work as well as grant information.

The cost estimate to preserve and make a copy of 1000 feet of 16mm film (about 28 minutes) is nearly $4,000 and the cost to digitize the preserved film is nearly $1,000. This cost is for a professional film conservation lab to do the work.

Good presenters and good information. Also we got the chance to talk to other colleagues about our Flickr project. There was a lot of interest from other institutions in using Flickr for their photos as well.