Allie Whalen, UCLA Libraries, Summer 2015, IMLS
At the UCLA Audiovisual Preservation Lab, I worked on a partially processed private donation from S.A. Griffin, a prolific poet and actor from the Los Angeles neo-beat movement of the late 1980s to early 2000s. The S.A. Griffin collection includes a range of art, ephemera, and audiovisual materials, such as footage of poetry readings and various musical and art performances at Los Angeles venues, some that no longer exist. The collection is primarily made up of second or later generation duplicates of independent recordings, including compilations of clips from a home voicemail machine, radio broadcasts, demos, readings, memorial services, and interviews. Additionally, the collection includes professional and semi-professional productions such as Key-Z Productions (a production company run by author Ken Kesey with tapes “Can You Pass The Acid Test?”), The Boss (a public access variety show on EZ-TV), and Rose of Sharon Press (S.A. Griffin’s independent record label). My primary task was to prioritize and digitize analog tapes. During post-digitization, I embedded metadata, transcoded derivatives, ran quality checks, generated MD5 checksums, and verified file fixity for all created digital files. Yasmin Dessem, my supervisor, and I will co-present on the issues we encountered during the digitization of the S.A. Griffin collection at the annual Audio Engineering Society Convention in New York in October 2015 in a session titled “Anatomy of a Bootleg: One Part Poetry, One Part Punk”.
Allie Whalen at UCLA Libraries
