How Open Source Audiovisual Tools Help Archivists (And You Too!)

hi!

Why?

So, why? Why this connection between archivists and OSS? Y'know, I think this is for a variety of reasons. - A lot of funding for archives, especially for technology-based projects, are based on the grants funding model. - Archives are also very much underfunded in general, so there's a financial need for free solutions. - There's a need for sustainable solutions, too. The LIS field continually gets burned by vendor lock-in problems, and closed-source software is in many ways fundamentally un-archiveable unless reverse-engineered, so it's cool if our tools are also self-preserving by at least being open. - We already rely heavily on existing open source tools like ffmpeg, mediainfo to do our jobs. So we are already comfortable with this ecosystem even if we don't know anything about fostering our own or contributing back. - We have advocates in the community. I mean, so much of my work is completely build on top of others (mostly Dave Rice). Reto Kromer... there are a lot of people in the community that also have come across this from a preservationist background and realized the value of open source.

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