BAVC Media’S PRESERVATION DEPARTMENT AWARDED KNIGHT FOUNDATION PROTOTYPE FUND FOR INNOVATIVE OPEN SOURCE PROJECT

San Francisco, CA — Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC Media) is excited to announce that it is one of 16 recipients of the Knight Foundation’s summer 2014 Prototype Fund. The $35,000 award supports six months of development for key components of an open source project that makes video preservation easier for journalists and others.

BAVC Media’s Prototype Fund award will support its video and audio Preservation Department in developing QC Capture, a video digitization app that allows media organizations, journalists and others to easily preserve aging video tape. The app will be the newest component in the QCTools suite and BAVC Media believes that the project will be indispensable for both preservation professionals and arts and culture organizations that have to act quickly to preserve legacies stored on older, at-risk media.

“Support from the Knight Foundation’s Prototype Fund, and being included among such a fantastic group of grantees whose project development we can learn from, is exciting. I know the project will be stronger with Knight’s support and from developing within this incredible community,” said BAVC Media Executive Director Carol Varney.

Added Sam Long, BAVC Media’s Director of Technology: “We’re very excited to be working alongside such a brilliant ensemble of projects and for this opportunity to make a vital contribution to the preservation field. Thanks to the Knight Prototype Fund, BAVC Media will be able to spearhead the development of the QC Capture app, providing a community-driven resource that we hope will become a leading tool for ensuring media longevity.”

The Knight Foundation supports transformational ideas that promote quality journalism, advance media innovation, engage communities and foster the arts.

Since 1994, BAVC Media has served as the nation’s hub for the preservation of cultural and community-based media, ensuring the survival of and continued access to video art, independently produced media and video documentation of cultural and political events since the late 1960s. Previous preservation clients have included MoMA, National Museum of History at Smithsonian, San Francisco Public Library, SFMOMA, The Kitchen, Walker Art Center, the Center for Asian American Media, the Long Beach Museum of Art and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. BAVC Media has preserved works by Ant Farm, the Videofreex, Paper Tiger TV and Media Burn, Nam Jun Paik, Vito Acconci, Joan Jonas, Paul McCarthy, Doug Hall, Terry Fox, William Wegman, John Baldessari, Richard Serra and more.

Initial development of the QCTools suite was supported by a generous grant from the  National Endowment for the Humanities. BAVC Media’s initiatives supporting the preservation field, including the AV Artifact Atlas—a community-based online resource supporting the identification and definition of the technical issues and anomalies that can afflict audio and video signals—have received support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. BAVC Media’s Preservation Access Program, which is funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, provides subsidized preservation services to artists and cultural institutions nationwide. Applications are being accepted for the program through July 31st. Visit https://bavc.org/preservation-access-program for more information.

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The Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC Media) was founded in 1976 to support freedom of expression by making advanced media technology accessible to independent media makers and nonprofits. We teach. We empower creative expression. We preserve the past. And we develop future media makers and innovators. BAVC Media's mission is to be the nation's most advanced noncommercial media access and training center. Visit BAVC Media online at https://bavc.org.