BAVC Media at AMIA 2024: Advancing Preservation, Mentorship, and Community Archiving
The Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) annual conference was held in Milwaukee earlier this month. As in-person attendance has been steadily increasing since the remote-only conferences of 2020 and 2021, this year’s venue became a bustling mini-city hosting the brightest minds in film, video, and sound preservation.
BAVC Media was among the most visible organizations at the conference, participating in a variety of panels, presentations, and poster sessions. Our Preservation team attended including Tim Lake, Victoria “Kiki” Fajardo, Chris Castro, Adira-Danique Philyaw and Kelli Hix.
Camcorder footage captured by Preservation Lab Manager, Christopher Castro
In alignment with our core mission, BAVC Preservation is a leader in creating solutions for accessibility, particularly empowering underrepresented communities with the technical skills and tools required to digitize their analog content, on their own terms. Our Hands-On Training with Analog Playback Equipment initiative received its own presentation, highlighting the reach of our skill-sharing, from Hawai’i to New York, and many places in between. This initiative is further supported by the findings of our comprehensive survey, Mapping the Magnetic Media Landscape, identifying gaps in knowledge and resources for historically marginalized communities on a national scale.
Our team also participated in this year’s Community Archiving Workshop (CAW) at AMIA. CAWs pair archivists with local volunteers in order to conduct basic processing, cataloging and inspection of an endangered audiovisual collection. In doing so, volunteers learn how to identify risk factors for AV materials, and archivists make preservation recommendations. This year’s partner organization was TRUE Skool, a non-profit which engages, empowers and educates youth, families and communities through transformative arts and hip-hop culture.
TRUE Skool
TRUE Skool holds materials for the MKE Hip Hop Archive – a project which was established on Hip Hop’s 50th Birthday. The workshop was a rousing success where more than 200 assets of magnetic and optical media were inspected and cataloged. This was a great opportunity to connect with a local community based org in Milwaukee. While inspecting a CD that included content featuring Bay Area Hip Hop artists and True Skools founder Fidel, we were also able to bridge the Bay Area hip hop scene to Milwaukees. Fidel was excited to learn about BAVC Media and connecting with us not only on a media preservation level, but also for TRUE Skools youth and young media makers.
Director of Preservation, Tim Lake
In addition to the CAW, our Team had a presence on panels about mentoring within the AMIA community and their work as an AMIA Pathways Fellow. The panels included the “Building Professional Mentorship in the Field” and “Pathways Fellowship: Reports From the Field” panel. Presenting on these panels allowed us to highlight BAVC Preservation team’s commitment to empowering underrepresented and disenfranchised members of the archivists community who are new to the field to have the technical skills and tools to grow in the field.
