Bay Area TV Archive partners with Quartex for AV pilot project

Adam Matthew Digital has announced today that Bay Area TV Archive (BATA), a unit of the Special Collections and Archives at San Francisco State University’s J. Paul Leonard Library, has partnered with Quartex for a two-year Pilot Project exploring effective display of audio and video content. BATA is the first partner in the Quartex AV Pilot and will be joined by others in the coming months.

Alex Cherian, Television Archivist at BATA, plans to migrate all 52 of the Archive’s collections over a two-year period, comprising around 2,500 assets, which are predominantly video content totalling around 18,000 minutes. As part of the pilot, BATA will also collaborate with Quartex development staff on enhanced AV capabilities that will extend the discoverability and usability of AV content for BATA and other repositories with significant AV collections. 

"As our AV content grows, the Quartex platform will ensure that every second of unique footage can be easily found and viewed online. I'm really excited about this collaboration!"

Alex Cherian, Television Archivist at BATA

 

A renowned archive, BATA content includes videos of Muhammad Ali, Robert Kennedy campaigning in San Francisco, the Black Panthers, Joan Baez, and more. Moving the Archive to Quartex will improve accessibility, as the platform allows auto-generation of transcription and closed captioning, which is of vital importance to both the academic community at San Francisco State and the larger public who are accessing the BATA Archive and engaging with the materials. Quartex can also offer multiple entry points into the archives and highlight relationships between content and collections, aiding discovery for anyone interested in this rich archival content.

"The captioning and transcriptions project will enhance our students’ experience of working with primary source material. The ability to search and identify text within media for systemic analysis is much needed. The potential of this project to create more flexible learning opportunities, when working remotely with curriculum, and the opportunity to support original research by faculty is applauded. The “upgrade” of searchable text creates increased opportunities for student research, scholarly development, and local community engagement."

Professor Dawn-Elissa Fischer, Associate Professor, Anthropology, SF State

“This is the most wonderful resource for anything to do with California history - and so many other stories that intersect with it. I am constantly amazed by the many wonderful videos I find, ranging from simple, single news reports from a very local disturbance or issue to thought-provoking in-depth documentaries made by some of the best, most socially-conscious filmmakers of the era of television history. The existence of much more additional text to search for the content of BATA’s many videos streaming publicly online will further enhance one of the already best urban area archival collections in the country.”

Lewanne Jones – archival producer and researcher

To find out more about this partnership, please contact Martin Drewe – Head of Customer Experience at Adam Matthew Digital.