Photo on this page by Inga Degenhard.
Report on the Summer School "Digital Archives" 2024
23-27 September 2024, Filmuniversität Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF / Bundesarchiv
From 23 to the 27 September 2024, the third issue of the Summer School “Digital Archives” took place in Potsdam/Berlin as a collaboration between the Filmuniversity Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF, the Bundesarchiv and the FIAF Cataloguing & Documentation Commission.
Like the years before, ca. 20 people from all over the world met for five days. This year participants joined from Mexico, Brazil, the US, Estonia, Netherlands, Austria, Slovakia, Italy, Luxembourg, Israel, and Germany.
The topic of the Summer School this year was focussed on machine-assisted processes, offering beginner classes in how to use widely adopted open source tools to support archival tasks: including metadata extraction, transcoding, data enrichment and file maintenance.
After a day at the Bundesarchiv, where we scanned a newsreel and introduced our access digitisation workflow, the participants gained insight into various open source tools.
Paul Duchesne (National Film and Sound Archive of Australia) and Joanna White (British Film Institute) showed the group how to use command-line prompts across different systems (Windows, Linux), as well as FFmpeg (and its application in encoding/decoding, muxing/demuxing). They also introduced the Python language and its surrounding architecture, including Anaconda, Jupyter, as well as GitHub and RAWcooked in order to use it for digital preservation at large. In addition to that, everyone could experiment with open-source tools for extraction, such as Whisper for speech-to-text conversion and discuss Large Language Models like Llama.
The full program of the Summer School can be found here.
Paul and Joanna did an amazing job in juggling a very full teaching schedule, while at the same time taking into consideration that not every person had the same level of expertise. They took time to help the participants to run the code, install the tools and answer all the questions.
I would like to thank the Film University Babelsberg, in particular Monika Richter, Anja Dornieden and especially Inga Degenhard, my colleagues at the Bundesarchiv (Stephanie Müller, Heike Thörner, Julia Kästle, Jenny Müller, Petra Jakobik, Anne Wyrwich, Cathleen Ehrmüller), and FIAF (Christophe Dupin) for its support.
However, most of all I’d like to express my heartfelt gratitude to Joanna and Paul as well as their respective institutions (in particular Stephen McConnachie) for providing their time and expertise to spread knowledge about open source tools, digital preservation issues and how to solve them.
All their slides are available on GitHub.
Adelheid Heftberger, Head of the CDC, 13.10.2024
