Quality in Quantity: QCTools for Mass-Digitization

Illuminated in Mike Casey’s "Why Media Preservation Can’t Wait: the Gathering Storm" (IASA No. 44, January 2015), the magnetic media crisis - a combination of equipment obsolescence and material degradation that signals the end of audiovisual records on physical magnetic tape - has accelerated archival efforts in mass-digitization.
 
But with the promise of mass-digitization comes a sacrifice: intensive monitoring that ensures the authenticity of the physical source is retained during its transformation to a digital file. In such a landscape, reliable quality control reporting is a critical component for holding staff and vendors accountable towards achieving a repository’s preservation goals.
 
Enter QCTools, free and open source software for the quality control of digital video files. Launched by the Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC) in 2013, QCTools has since evolved into a popular resource in the archival profession, proving the value of a community-developed response in a terrain dominated by proprietary solutions. To date, QCTools has been ideal for one-to-one monitoring, small-scale operations, and educational settings. But, in 2016, with the support of the National Endowment of the Humanities, QCTools will expand, offering visualizations and reporting features that accommodate the needs of large-scale digitization initiatives.
 
In partnership with Mike Casey’s team at Indiana University’s Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative, the Bay Area Video Coalition is facilitating a two-year project to implement QCTools into their large-scale digitization workflows, one that will serve as a model for other institutions struggling with an influx of digitized audiovisual material entering their repositories. During this presentation, the audience will be introduced to the advances and developments of the "QCTools: Quality in Quantity" project with particular attention paid to both the practical and philosophical ramifications of this valuable new tool.
 
In the spirit of the free-and-open-sourced community, two preservationists from the Bay Area Video Coalition will tag-team a dynamic, town-hall style presentation that includes a demonstration of the most up-to-date version of QCTools (at the time of conference), a call-and-response session that engages the audience in the science behind the software, and a show-and-tell of the D3.js visualizations that will be a fundamental feature of the final product (with a launch date in early 2017). The audience will leave the session with a clearer picture of the following subjects and their archival implications.
 
Mass-digitization
Quality control
QCTools software and accompanying applications, including:
SignalServer web application
D3.js data visualizations (https://d3js.org/)