Please note: much of the below is taken from the UCLA Library Special Collection’s finding aid, which was vetted by June Wayne herself.
Wayne at an exhibition in the 1950s.
Visual artist June Claire Wayne was born on March 7, 1918 in Chicago, Illinois, where she was raised by her divorced mother, Dorothy Alice Kline. At age 15, Wayne dropped out of high school to pursue a career as an artist. By 1938 she had achieved prominence among world-famous writers, actors, artists, and scientists in an international milieu.
When WWII ended, Wayne left Chicago to settle in Los Angeles, where she became an integral part of the California art scene. Inspired by her training in production illustration, Wayne began to produce seminal works of optical art, including The Tunnel and the Kafka series, in the mid 1940s. She continued to expand her artistic horizons, taking up lithography at Lynton Kistler’s facility in 1947. Ten years later, she began collaborating with master printer Marcel Durassier in Paris. In their groundbreaking work on the John Donne suite, Wayne invented many of lithography’s current techniques, vastly expanding the aesthetic potential of the medium. In order to restore the art of lithography in the United States, she founded the Tamarind Lithography Workshop with the support of the Ford Foundation in 1960. Now known as the Tamarind Institute of the University of New Mexico, this organization continues to thrive and help artists become free enterprise workers in the print world.
The collection at the UCLA Library consists of June Wayne’s personal and professional correspondence and documents pertaining to her career as a painter, lithographer, weaver, writer and political and civil activist. Through the Arcadia fund, UCLA Library Preservation Unit has recently undertaken the digitization of many of the rare audiovisual materials in the collection. The contents of these vary, including audio recordings of the Joan of Art seminar series, audio “letters” from June Wayne to Mary Baskett (author of The Art of June Wayne in 1969), home movies, documentation of exhibitions, and many other lectures and interviews of Wayne throughout her career. There is still much work to be done, but eventually the digitized files will be available to researchers through the UCLA Library Digital Collections program.
June Wayne passed away on August 23, 2011 in Los Angeles.
This audio clip is of June Wayne speaking at one of the Joan of Art Seminars in 1972. The original item is held by the UCLA Library’s Special Collections and was reformatted for preservation through the Arcadia fund. Click the following: JoanofArtClip72
My name is Amanda Smith and I graduated this Spring with a master’s degree from UCLA’s Moving Image Archive Studies (MIAS) program. During the quarter before I graduated, I was an intern in the Preservation Unit of the UCLA Library working with Siobhan Hagan on audiovisual materials. I had a great time and learned a lot, so I wanted to share a little bit of what I did. » Read the rest of this entry «
Frank Zappa discusses music in libraries! This clip is from an interview with Frank Zappa conducted on October 12, 1988 by Martin Perlich. Perlich, a writer, producer and distinguished broadcaster, hosted and produced the interview series ARF!! (Arts & Roots Forum) which aired daily on Los Angeles public radio. The show featured major cultural figures as well as dozens of arts figures. UCLA Library Special Collections holds the Martin Perlich Interviews 1965- Collection. A recent preservation reformatting project uncovered this aural gem: and there will plenty more to come in the near future!
I wanted to share a video of a presentation that the Preservation Unit gave on February 15, 2012 to the UCLA Library Collections Council. While the video explains what the Preservation Unit does and introduces the major players, there has been a huge change since this presentation was given: our fearless leader Jacob Nadal has left UCLA Library for the Brooklyn Historical Society. While we are very sad about this, we are at least somewhat consoled by the very happy news that as of the beginning of April 2012, Dawn Aveline has joined the Preservation Department as Preservation Specialist. » Read the rest of this entry «
Allow me to introduce myself to the readers of the UCLA Library’s Preservation Blog: my name is Siobhan Hagan, and I am the UCLA Library’s new Audiovisual Preservation Specialist (full disclosure: I started in July of 2011, so I am not as “new” as you might think). In Latin, “audio, video, disco” means “I hear, I see, I learn”. I love obsolete things, like Latin and Umatic videocassettes, so I strive for each and every day in my job to include some element of a Disco: to remember that learning is fun, especially in the light of a darkened room with flickers and strobes of unique moving images and sounds. » Read the rest of this entry «
I gave a talk for the Amigos “Digital Preservation: What’s Now? What’s Next” conference today in which I trotted out what I consider one of my better formulations of (one of) the model(s) I use for thinking about preservation. This model says that preservation consists in sustainable efforts, optimized over time. The change is from thinking of “preservation” and “preserved” as closed efforts or checklists of pre-defined actions to be completed. Instead, the focus is on ranking the “preservation” of things and having a process for “preserving” them.
With that distinction made, it becomes clearer that preservation/preserving is a function of strategy and management and that preserved/preservable is a function of technical knowledge about the specific types of objects in an archives’ care. For the strategic side of the process, I think Snowden and Kurtz’ Cynefin model is the most useful thing going, closely followed by Shenton and the British Library’s work on Life-cycle Collection Mangement.
For the objects themselves, I propose the following model:
Substrate: tangible substance(s) that carries media
Media: material(s) that record information
Transport: means(s) for perceiving media
Language: system(s) for interpretation of media
In this way, digital preservation and artifactual preservation can be dealt with as different instances of the same basic problem. Preservation succeeds when failures in all four factors are eliminated, corrected, or mitigated and there is a sustainable process in place that will support prevention and repair or recovery at appropriate times.
On July 15, I led a workshop for UCLA Library staff and some guests from the Southern UCs. We covered a lot of topics that bear on preserving digital collections: specifics of preservation theory as it plays out in digital libraries, creating digital objects, strategies for future access and risk-assessment of contemporary digital objects, metadata, and digital repositories. Obviously this was a broad but shallow overview. The target audience was non-specialists who nonetheless do a lot of work with digital libraries and need to be aware of the issues that are in play.
In the next few days I’ll update this post with my slides and notes. I’d welcome comments and questions from teh attendees. I think we’ll do a refined version in the fall and develop that as a webinar for the UCs. In addition, the California Preservation Program will work with Infopeople to deliver this as a more generalized webinar for non-UC audiences. So, vote early, vote often, and let me know what you’d like to see in version 2.
This could hearken back to my earlier post about tangible records – the cloud is a set of real, live data centers, filled with drives where your files are written and re-written – but instead, I want to call out two numbers: 99.95% and 99.93%. Those are the levels of uptime promised by Amazon’s Service Level Agreement (SLA) and the percentage that Ars determines that they reached after the outage.
At Amazon’s scale, even .07% amounts to a real problem. We experience this in libraries, too. Only a few percent of the 9 million books in the UCLA Library collection are irreparably brittle or damaged, but that’s still a few hundred thousand books.
I think there are two important lessons from this: one is that we need to take our concerns about digital preservation in context. Digital storage and delivery systems are very reliable. On a percentage basis, there’s a case to be made that they’re more reliable than our print storage and delivery systems. In a recent review within the UC, we saw lost/missing rates of about 1%, more than an order of magnitude greater than Amazon’s .07%. Of course, that comparison is not apples-to-apples, or even fruit-to-fruit. Digital systems and print systems are different and distinctive. But I think we should be cautious about our rhetoric. It’s easy to talk about digital preservation problems, but print has plenty of preservation challenges, too.
This a good reminder about what it means to be a trustworthy digital archive. For day-to-day reliability, a network service like Vimeo, Google Video, or YouTube is a good choice. These services farm out the work of good system administration, so that the work is done in an environment that has a high stake in success and is able to operate systems on a scale that leads to tremendous benefits. These services have remarkable uptime, they’re resilient, and they save individuals the pain of managing backup routines and doing recovery tests and all the other hassle of good system administration. For all these reasons, I think that LOCKSS-like network services have tremendous value and need to be a key piece of our preservation infrastructure.
There is another part of the digital preservation problem that has little do with technology. Reliable technology exists in unreliable organizations. If you’re banking with a provider that doesn’t have the same goals for posterity as your do, then you need an exit strategy. This goes for online video services just as it goes for the real estate of a storage facility. » Read the rest of this entry «
During the 19th and 20th centuries, preservation in research libraries evolved around two functions: preservation and conservation. Roughly, preservation is concerned with collection-wide actions to prevent damage and decay, while conservation is focused on corrective repair of past damage and decay. By analogy, I often say that in libraries, preservation is a mix of hospital administration and public health, while conservation represents surgical and medical specialties.
Conservators know their medium, know their limits, have some sound general principles for their work, and they know their colleagues. If we have a textile conservation question at UCLA, for instance, between our conservator, Kristen St. John, and myself, we know enough to avoid screw-ups, but we also know who to call to get intelligent, experienced guidance.
I find myself on the lookout for the digital equivalent quite often – the programmers, systems administrators, computer scientists, and electrical engineers who live in their medium and know the right calls to make (or emails to send) to get information from across the field. Just as conservators grew out of the craft traditions of their media, I’m hoping that the digital craft traditions will start to yield some people who are primed and engaged to think about how to stabilize, repair, and rehabilitate digital objects.
As a fun little example, here’s the world’s easiest and least expensive web archiving system. It’s part of the uprgrade options for the pinboard system, which I use for my personal bookmarking. A few months back, the developer decided to offer an archiving service. I signed up (and yes, I do intend to write off the twenty-five bucks I paid as a research expense). Here’s the development team, Maciej Ceglowski and Peter Gadjokov, on the behind-the-scenes of their archive system:
The bookmark archive makes heavy use of wget, with some postprocessing to handle the common case where stylesheets and other inline content are versioned by appending a random string to the filename (“main.css?90xs8″). This versioning messes up Apache’s ability to guess the content type of the file from its extension when it comes time to serve the archived file, so we do some renaming and symlinking behind the scenes to make sure archived files get served back properly.
Our technical goals are to never lose data, be very fast, and favor boring and faded technologies where possible. A rule of thumb that has worked well for me is that if I’m excited to play around with something, it probably doesn’t belong in production.
Now, is this tool as robust as the UC3 Web Archiving System? I don’t know. It’s fast, though, and cheap, and most importantly, it’s the kind of thinking that gets me excited. This is web-archiving by guys who build web-sites, and those guys are starting to talk about preservation.
