User:Drpencil9/Howard Besser

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Besser grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and earned a Bachelor's degree in 1976 from the University of California, Berkeley. He studied film in Paris at the Centre Internationale d'Études des Cinema. He earned a Master's and PhD in Library Science in 1977 and 1988 respectively, both from UC Berkeley.

Besser was on the faculty of UC Berkeley's School of Information for a number of years, before accepting a position as professor at UCLA's School of Education and Information Studies in 1999. He retired from UCLA, becoming a Professor Emeritas there, in order to found the MIAP program at New York University in 2004. He also taught at the University of Michigan's School of Information and at the University of Pittsburgh.

Besser is the most highly published author on this subject in professional journals, is a frequent speaker to both professional and commercial conferences, and he regularly conducts preconference workshops on image databases at the meetings of a number of different professional organizations. Consulted for a wide range of organizations, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Canadian Museum of Civilization, UNESCO, the Italian Association for Computing Machinery, Howard Besser is one of the worlds leading authorites on image databases.

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Howard Besser is a central figure in the world of digital imaging and multimedia database. Preserving images digitally and making them accessible for long-term was the need of the hour. In this context, Besser made remarkable contributions. He serves as a Professor of Cinematic Studies at New York University. Also, Besser works as a Senior Scientist at New York University's Digital Library Initiative. He conducted extensive research in the fields of image database, multimedia operation, digital library, and social and cultural influence of the latest information technology (Digital Pioneer, 2012). Besser developed expertise in libraries’ new technology, archives, and museum (Drewes, 2018). He has been actively contributing at international level to build metadata and upgrade the quality of the cultural heritage community (NLS). Predominantly, he focused on image and multimedia databases (Besser, 2003); digital library aspects (particularly related to quality, intellectual property, and longevity); cultural and societal impacts of information technology; and developing new methods of teaching through technology such as web-based instructions and distance learning. The department of Information Technology at the University of California began developing a project of the high-standard digital image. The project developers believed that the software (Image Query) served as a breakthrough in a multi-user digital-image database. The user interface technology known as X Window was the main feature of ImageQuery. The system was capable of including various features such as point and click searching, GUI (Graphic User Interface), and thumbnail. Drawing upon this work, Besser worked on a major project named The Museum Site Licensing Project (MESL). It was a significant initiative to have the collection of images alongside metadata from numerous cultural institutes and transform them into digital technology for the users of university at campus networks (McClung, & Stephenson, 1998). The project was in collaboration with seven universities, the Library of Congress, and six museums. The project delivered a dataset of almost ten thousand digital images and related metadata for classroom use. This research also analyzed the requirements of implementors and what do they need to consider while working on digital imaging projects in university. Importantly, Besser focused on the integration of critical theory concepts and design issues (Besser, 1997). He worked hard for several years to develop and test new ways for incorporating technology in teaching. For the past 27 years, he has been using the internet as a major component of instructional assistance, saving teaching materials and curriculum on the World Wide Web. Besser motivates students to participate in online discussions with their peers in a constructive way. He served as a faculty member at the University of Michigan (School of Information); he led a committee for the development of curriculum in digital publishing and multimedia. Due to Besser's guidance, graduates and students of the Moving Image Archive and Preservation Program from New York University acknowledged the importance of Occupy Wall Street movement alongside the significance of the digital artifacts associated with it (De Stefano, 2003). Under the leadership of Besser, they developed the Activist Archivists and began planning on preserving the content (NYC.edu). The fundamental objective of this effort was to convey the digital preservation information effectively and concisely (Trant et al., 2002). Besser’s team articulated important pieces of text and published them on the post-cards; they distributed those cards to the individuals in public places. In this way, they played their role to raise awareness about digital technology (Digital Humanities). For example, “Why Archive” postcard contained information about accountability and archives as proofs to hold people in power accountable (Ashenfelder, 2012). The graduates and experts under the leadership of Besser designed a crash course about digital preservations, supported by videos and links to materials for using video in the long-term. Similarly, the course taught students about the best practices that video activists can employ. Additionally, the course material included the details of legal restrictions in seeking permissions from the people to record their activities; it also dealt with the policy of copyright so that the creators’ original work is not stolen by anyone. The course emphasizes the idea of obtaining a Creative Common license that will enable the repository to archiving the content and making it accessible in the future. The occupy movement has been recorded since its beginning in September 2011; in that regard, thousands of photos were taken, hundreds of people tweeted about it, and several recordings were available. However, creators expressed concern about the preservation of this digital material (Lyman & Besser, 2013). At the time of the emergence of Activist Archivists, some suspicion surfaced. In fact, the movement had developed the archives of working class, but it was meant to save the content of artifacts (Ricci, 2008). For example, the symbols carried by the protestors. The archivists worked alongside New York University Tamiment Library to crowd-source the range of videos obtained from You Tube that were relevant to the movement. Some categories were developed, for example Celebrity Visits and “Clashes with Police,” and archivists decided to ask movement’s members to complete an online form pointing at the five most interesting videos from each category. Having members to allocate metadata to the media which they developed was a challenging task. According to Besser, “tags” was the idea of metadata. Therefore, plenty of educational material was made available about technical metadata with different types of illustrations. The objective was to make metadata recommendation that may not be followed by the users. To facilitate users, Besser worked with his team to develop an app for users’ phones so that they fill the form, which could instantly record a few things such as date, time, and GPS location and update it with a video or photo. Furthermore, Besser has always supported the idea of collecting metadata right from the beginning when digital content is created (Besser, 1997). He knows even if he gets community members to develop metadata to share files over the internet, some components of metadata may be removed when the documents/files are downloaded from or uploaded to specific websites. Practically, with the app, Besser attempted to foster effective metadata practices within the community. According to Besser, the process needs automation. For memory institutions, ingestion of huge digital work will be unlikely for memory institutions. Likewise, cultural institutions would not have resources to integrate metadata and to collect large amount of work added by the thousands of people (Gracy, 2013). The experiences of Archive Activists with the occupy movement depict the situation of archivists in the future. The archivists will experience the enormous quantity of material contributed by the users. Moreover, controlling the quality would not be a straightforward task. The archivists are likely to encounter inconsistency in data, and there will be the lack of guiding material with the organizational record. The efforts of Archivists Activists in the context of the Occupy movement describe the significance of the involvement of archivist in the initial phase of the important event (Erde, 2014). The archivist is the one who uses their skill to impact the behavior of a content creator. Besser focuses on the outreach of the Activist Archivists; he indicated that his team members have taken up the small things, and they all worked with local community. He also sponsored a session of the Association of Moving Image Archivists in December 2012 in which people discussed various dimensions of community archiving. Besser’s team approached different locations that had collections, and attempted to create more sustainability in them.

Study:

Without long-term preservation, though, viruses and worms themselves will be difficult to analyze, research or write about. Cultural heritage institutions should seek to archive malware in ways that render it safely accessible to researchers and historians.

Preservation:

Within weeks of the occupation of Zuccotti Park last fall archivists from the New-York Historical Society and other institutions were out scooping up posters, fliers, pamphlets, signs and other ephemera. “For us, it’s an event in New York City,” said Jean Ashton, the society’s executive vice president and director of its library, which has so far amassed several hundred Occupy-related artifacts. “We want to make sure that people understand what happened here.”

One of Besser's many projects was in 2011 when he vigorously organized a group of librarians called the Activist Archivists who would record and document the famous Occupy Movement.

Personal/Outreach:

In 1996, Howard Besser created a database for his library school students in Ann Arbor Michigan to teach cataloging instructions. The database was created with a modest 533 t-shirts and had reached over 2400 T-shirts in the collection. Besser t-shirts all had purpose and messages behind them that conveyed his politics, foreign issues, social issues, and protest statements.