Smithsonian Folklife Festival Documentation: Born Digital Workflows, Strategies and Challenges

Stephanie Smith, “The Smithsonian Folklife Festival and the Evolution of a Born Digital Image Documentation Workflow”
David Walker, “The Development of a Born Digital Audio Documentation Workflow for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival”
Crystal Sanchez, “Creating a Born Digital Smithsonian Folklife Festival Video Documentation Workflow for Archive and Production Needs”
 
The Smithsonian Folklife Festival is an annual 10-day international exhibition of living cultural heritage held on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Since our first festival in 1967, documentation has played a crucial role. Hundreds of regional and ethnic communities come to share songs, performances, craft traditions, cooking techniques, oral histories, occupational culture, and narratives about cultural traditions and issues — most of which have been captured through images, audio, and video over the years.
 
Stephanie Smith will present a brief history of the Festival’s documentation efforts, with an outline of the workflow developed for processing digital images that later provided a model for digital audio and video documentation. All workflows now include the use of embedded metadata and ingestion of the files into an Open Text digital asset management system.
 
Over the past five years, as digital audio files replaced analog and digital audio cassettes, new archival workflows for Festival audio documentation were developed. David Walker will provide a detailed overview of recent audio documentation strategies, covering methods of capturing metadata; the transfer and transcoding of digital audio files from the field; and the access needs of the material for audio and video production.
 
Over the last two years, the Archives has begun to work closely with Festival video producers to adapt the image and audio workflows to the needs of both file-based video production and archiving. Crystal Sanchez will speak to the changed role of the archivists in managing born digital Festival video during and after the Festival, illustrating a workflow that must respond to the needs of both the archive and the video producers.
 
Documenting the Smithsonian Folklife Festival produces thousands of born digital files which increase in number almost every year. For example, the 2014 Festival produced 23,903 digital files, of which 6,017 were audio and video. The 2014 total amounted to 9.74 terabytes of data. Transforming, managing, and archiving these files are ongoing activities. The process utilizes the Smithsonian’s Digital Asset Management System as the storage and management system for these terabytes of Festival data. Although the workflows for image, audio, and video documentation involve various personnel in the production and archiving steps, each workflow informs the other, allowing for a comprehensive approach to managing Festival documentation that enriches the entire collection. Ongoing challenges and demonstrated efficiencies across the different documentation media will be highlighted.