The University of Georgia’s Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection has partnered with the Georgia State University Heritage Preservation Program for the digitization of The Andrew Avery Collection, which provides important historical footage of South Georgia from the 1930s to the 1950s. The concentration in Public History for my Master’s capstone project, inspired by the advice of Media Archivist Margie Compton, led me to apply OHMS to a niche of Georgia history, the prolific home movies by Andrew Avery. In these films Avery extensively documented life in Bainbridge, Georgia and the surrounding area in this time period. Exploring Avery’s home movies in this way is a natural extension of my undergraduate studies in film, which I am redirecting toward making history more accessible to researchers, as well as to the public. My efforts are symbiotic with the Archive’s ongoing continuous improvement to make navigation of sometimes obscure content more intuitive and less cumbersome in order to unlock the vast content contained in moving images such as Avery’s.
The Brown Media Archives saw this collection as an important historical record in need of improved online access. At present, elements are presented as a simple YouTube videos with no indexing, transcripts or shot lists to allow viewers to pinpoint specific content within the footage. The archive saw a need to do this with The Andrew Avery Collection and has decided that the need to provide access to this collection online was essential to the current use of new digital media within the archive.
When the collection was initially donated to the Archive in the 1990s, the original films were transferred to preservation prints using polyester-based film, thanks to a generous donation from The Kirbo Foundation. However, an analog preservation print does little to facilitate the ability to index and search the content. Thankfully, digital technology such as film scanners, cataloging software (OHMS) and media players have evolved to a sufficient level of maturity, which allows us to convert preservation prints to a digital format much more accessible to the public.
Once we had the original footage digitized, the next step was to consider how to make the material most effectively accessible to researchers. The Archive previously worked with the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History’s Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS) to catalog modern era films which have both video and audio. The transcript of the audio is indexed and synchronized to times stamps to facilitate searching the film.
The primary challenge associated with using this tool for our purposes is that movies like those found in the Andrew Avery Collection are silent film collections, while OHMS is traditionally used to make oral histories available and searchable. An adaption to OHMS addresses this challenge by substituting the oral transcript with the silent movie shot list. This of course presents the additional challenge that, whereas the oral history is merely transcribed, the shot list is a collection of frame descriptions that must be created anew. Fortunately, the shot lists for the Andrew Avery Collection have been created, but require significant effort to adapt to a digital format since the original shot lists were done for the VHS format. But once adapted, OHMS has two features that allow flexibility in how researchers approach content, the index and the transcript. We decided to experiment with both functions in order to provide multiple methods to research these films. The index provides a way to browse through segments of the footage, whereas the transcript allows researchers to browse the shot lists and pick specific time codes of subjects that they are interested in.
The Andrew Avery Collection is up on the Brown Media Archives website! Check out it through the link below!
OHMS: The Andrew Avery Collection
The Brown Media Archives saw this collection as an important historical record in need of improved online access. At present, elements are presented as a simple YouTube videos with no indexing, transcripts or shot lists to allow viewers to pinpoint specific content within the footage. The archive saw a need to do this with The Andrew Avery Collection and has decided that the need to provide access to this collection online was essential to the current use of new digital media within the archive.
When the collection was initially donated to the Archive in the 1990s, the original films were transferred to preservation prints using polyester-based film, thanks to a generous donation from The Kirbo Foundation. However, an analog preservation print does little to facilitate the ability to index and search the content. Thankfully, digital technology such as film scanners, cataloging software (OHMS) and media players have evolved to a sufficient level of maturity, which allows us to convert preservation prints to a digital format much more accessible to the public.
Once we had the original footage digitized, the next step was to consider how to make the material most effectively accessible to researchers. The Archive previously worked with the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History’s Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS) to catalog modern era films which have both video and audio. The transcript of the audio is indexed and synchronized to times stamps to facilitate searching the film.
The primary challenge associated with using this tool for our purposes is that movies like those found in the Andrew Avery Collection are silent film collections, while OHMS is traditionally used to make oral histories available and searchable. An adaption to OHMS addresses this challenge by substituting the oral transcript with the silent movie shot list. This of course presents the additional challenge that, whereas the oral history is merely transcribed, the shot list is a collection of frame descriptions that must be created anew. Fortunately, the shot lists for the Andrew Avery Collection have been created, but require significant effort to adapt to a digital format since the original shot lists were done for the VHS format. But once adapted, OHMS has two features that allow flexibility in how researchers approach content, the index and the transcript. We decided to experiment with both functions in order to provide multiple methods to research these films. The index provides a way to browse through segments of the footage, whereas the transcript allows researchers to browse the shot lists and pick specific time codes of subjects that they are interested in.
The Andrew Avery Collection is up on the Brown Media Archives website! Check out it through the link below!
OHMS: The Andrew Avery Collection