Iron Mountain Entertainment Services (IMES), the Media & Entertainment division of Iron Mountain Incorporated® (NYSE: IRM), is preparing for the upcoming Audio Engineering Society (AES) 2023 Audio Archiving, Preservation and Restoration Conference (AAPR), taking place June 1 – 3 at the U.S. Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia. IMES is serving as Platinum Sponsor for the conference and will contribute to two panel discussions at the event.
This year’s conference offers a wealth of new technological innovations and updates in practice, procedure and archival philosophies. The 2023 program features more than 45 workshops, papers presentations, onsite facilities tours and a special event keynote by Leslie Ann Jones of Skywalker Sound, among other networking and social opportunities.
On Thursday, June 1, from 3:00 to 3:50 p.m. EDT, the panel “Automated Media Image Capture System at Iron Mountain Entertainment Services” will feature a discussion on the inspiration for and benefits of the design, development and roll-out of IMES’s new Automated Media Image Capture System (AMICS), a state-of-the-art solution designed to improve the accessibility and usability of large-scale audio archives. The system was created to address the needs of Universal Music Group’s archive and is now successfully being rolled out to other clients. The streamlined AMICS workflow combines the use of a proprietary mobile 6-sided camera capture station with a customized cloud-based asset management user interface. The new solution enables the capture and processing of metadata for more than 2500 media assets in a single eight-hour shift, enabling IMES’s clients to perform inventory search, filtering, workflow assignments and more with unprecedented ease and speed, transforming and lowering the total cost of media inventory management. The panel will explain AMICS, showcase inventory examples, share both challenges and lessons learned, and discuss how this technology could be seamlessly analyzed and curated by an AI/ML engine.
Panelists for the AMICS discussion will include Robert Koszela (Director, Studio Operations North America, IMES), Alex Tomlin (Senior Engineering Manager, IMES) and Nick Allen (Vice President of Asset & Archive Management, Universal Music Group). Meg Travis (Director, Global Head of Marketing & Communications, IMES) will serve as moderator.
The following day, on Friday, June 2, the panel “Combatting Knowledge Obsolescence: Training and Education Programs in Audio Archiving and Preservation” will take place from 11:00 a.m. to noon EDT. In his 2015 International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA) Journal article, “Why Media Preservation Can’t Wait: The Gathering Storm,” Indiana University’s Mike Casey writes: “As obsolescence deepens, the knowledge of how to repair old players becomes scarce. Even the knowledge and experience required to successfully play a deteriorating obsolete recording on a legacy playback machine fades away.” While the curriculum of most audio programs is rooted in the born-digital realm, there are a few training programs and initiatives that also focus on the preservation of analog and early digital carriers, and their playback equipment. This panel includes presentations on IMES’s first Audio Archiving Workshop that took place last summer; hands-on audio training offered through courses in UCLA’s media archival studies master’s degree program, using its Information Studies Media Preservation Lab; the research and efforts to develop a Media Archival and Restoration program at University of Saint Francis; and a new Education & Training Fellowship Program being created by the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC). The presentations will be followed by a discussion on goals and future plans, and a Q&A session with attendees.
Kelly Pribble (Director of Media Recovery Technology, Iron Mountain Entertainment Services) will appear as a panelist in this discussion, alongside Miles Fulwider (University of St. Francis), Yuri Shimoda (Disney Music Group/Association for Recorded Sound Collections [ARSC]) and Shawn VanCour (University of California Los Angeles).
For more information about the event, visit https://aes2.org/events-calendar/2023-aes-international-conference-on-archiving-preservation/.
To learn more about Iron Mountain Entertainment Services, please visit https://www.imes.media.
