Some thoughts following last week's CCAHA Conference
Posted by Christopher Markman
It's hard to summarize my thoughts for a lot of reasons. For one, this was a great experience in that I realized how much I already knew about audiovisual preservation, particularly the problems archivists face in terms of media boundaries. Secondly, it was a chance to meet with other professionals in the field, or at least see them in action. Thirdly, the whole event was a chance to visit my sister (she and her roommate were nice enough to lend a couch for those few days) and that meant a great time in Boston, period.
I already plan on writing a more formal post in the Team Miro Blog because they were nice enough to pay my way into the conference and I see a huge opportunity for collaboration there. So yes, this is more of a personal post but I'll spare the commentary on what I ate for dinner.
There were a lot of great presenters and speakers at the conference, and I have to say overall I thought the whole thing was very well put together. The end of the first day felt like a cliffhanger to say the least, and I could definitely feel the anticipation as we got into Friday. I only regret not being able to attend the tour of Harvard's archives on Wednesday because I registered so late, but I managed to spend that extra day in Boston constructively and generally contemplating my current living and working situation, so it wasn't a total loss.
By my estimates I was the youngest person in the room, and that was definitely a unique situation in and of itself. There were some collective groans from the audience as certain topics came up that I found particularly hilarious as a quasi-outsider. "Panda Porn" also came up a number of times on the second day too thanks to Sarah Stauderman's presentation wherein she mentioned some rather unique analog holdings in the Smithsonian and that never failed to get a laugh. Well, from me anyway.
I think I enjoyed the personal anecdotes almost as much as the educational bits, and that was a pleasant surprise. There was a lot of time dedicated to assessing current collection and working with vendors and grants which was hard to relate to but it gave some insight into how things are done (and from that, what my future might be like).
I could go deeper into detail about the content of the conference but the problems seem quite clear:
- Analog is dead, and from that we can learn some lessons about obsolescence.
- Digital isn't forever, but the tools we have are getting better.
- This is literally a race against time. Pooling our resources and relying on eachother as a community is the only viable option.
- I'm really glad I have the techy stuff down already ;-)
Posted: July 28, 2008 8:22 pm | 0 comments
Tags: CCAHA
