Joseph Heinen, Franklin Furnace, Spring 2013, NEH
Franklin Furnace is a non-profit organization that was founded in the mid-70s with a mission of acquiring funds to commission timely and adventurous works in performing arts. Their catalog contains approximately 1500 event records and 800 moving records. Ideally, every Franklin Furnace event has a paper folder with contracts, playbills, abstracts, slides, and so on and a record in the database. Moving image objects are acquired based on their relationship to a performance in the Franklin Furnace roster. A majority of the tapes are on VHS (in many cases transfered from open-reel or U-Matic) with some on Hi8 given that this was considered to be a preservation standard at one time.
My job was to review tapes, fish out the corresponding paper records, compare this information with the video in addition to the information in the three different tables in the Franklin Furnace database ("Events," "Moving Image," and "Movies" (older version of the "Moving Image" database)) and figure out what information to correct and retain. I also incorporated controlled vocabularly in areas where they were needed and added additional information regarding contributors, tape brand/model, preservation issues, and timecodes of individual segments within each tape. This process helped to inform a PBCore crosswalk that I wrote for Frankin Furnace in the event that they choose to incorporate a metadata schema that is more widely used. While PBCore is broadcasting standard that doesn't necessarily fit in with the workflow of this organization, Franklin Furnace has commissioned many of their works for netcasting, and language around versions (proposal/ documentation/live cast) and segments (individual clips or compilations of works within one tape) are well defined within this schema. I also helped to budget for future digitization efforts and personnel costs to be paid for by ArtStor, organized batches of tapes for preservation at StandyBy, inspected decks and video cables, researched Hard Drives, RAID standards, and checksums for digital management, and wrote a blog on some of my favorite videos in the collection.
Franklin Furnace
