Howard Besser (born c. 1952) is a scholar of
digital preservation
In library and archival science, digital preservation is a formal endeavor to ensure that digital information of continuing value remains accessible and usable. It involves planning, resource allocation, and application of preservation methods and ...
,
digital libraries
A digital library, also called an online library, an internet library, a digital repository, or a digital collection is an online database of digital objects that can include text, still images, audio, video, digital documents, or other digital m ...
, and
preservation of film and video. He is Professor of Cinema Studies and the founding director of the
NYU
New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then-Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin.
In 1832, the ...
br>
Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program("MIAP"), a graduate program in the
Tisch School. Besser also worked as a Senior Scientist at New York University's Digital Library Initiative. He conducted extensive research in image databases, multimedia operation, digital library, and social and cultural influence of the latest Information Technology.
Besser is a prolific writer and speaker, and has consulted with many governments, educational institutions, and arts agencies on digital preservation matters. Besser researched libraries' new technology, archives, and museums. Besser has been actively contributing at the international level to build metadata and upgrade the quality of the cultural heritage community. He predominantly, focused on image and multimedia databases; digital library aspects (related to quality, intellectual property, and longevity); cultural and societal impacts of information technology, and developing new teaching methods through technology such as web-based instructions and distance learning. Besser was closely involved in development of the
Dublin Core
220px, Logo image of DCMI, which formulates Dublin Core
The Dublin Core, also known as the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES), is a set of fifteen "core" elements (properties) for describing resources. This fifteen-element Dublin Core has ...
and the
Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard
The Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) is a metadata standard for encoding descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata regarding objects within a digital library, expressed using the XML schema language of the World Wid ...
(METS), international standards within librarianship.
["Howard Besser"](_blank)
''Digital Preservation Pioneers'', Library of Congress (Interview, last visited Aug. 9, 2012)
Biography
Besser grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and earned a Bachelor's degree in 1976 from the
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...
.
[National Research Council, Committee on Intellectual Property Rights in the Emerging Information Infrastructure, ''The Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Age'' (2000), pp. 254-255.] 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
The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California ...
's School of Education and Information Studies in 1999.
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 System
The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems.
X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting wi ...
was the main feature of Image Query. The system could include various features such as point and click searching, GUI (
Graphical user interface
The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inst ...
), and thumbnail. Drawing up this work, Besser worked on a major project named The Museum Site Licensing Project (MESL). It was a significant initiative to collect images alongside metadata from numerous cultural institutes and transformed them into digital technology for the users of university campus networks. The project collaborated 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. The research analyzed the requirements of implementors for working on digital imaging projects in universities.
He retired from UCLA, becoming a Professor Emeritas there, in order to found the MIAP program at
New York University
New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then- Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin.
In 1832, th ...
in 2004. He also taught at the
University of Michigan
, mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth"
, former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821)
, budget = $10.3 billion (2021)
, endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...
's School of Information and at the
University of Pittsburgh
The University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) is a public state-related research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The university is composed of 17 undergraduate and graduate schools and colleges at its urban Pittsburgh campus, home to the univers ...
.
Besser focused on integrating critical theory concepts and design issues.
He worked for several years to develop and test new ways for incorporating technology in teaching. For the past twenty seven years, he has been using the internet as a significant component of instructional assistance, saving teaching materials and curriculum on the
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet.
Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web ...
.
Contributions to Occupy Movement
One of Besser's many projects was in 2011 when he organized a group of librarians called the Activist Archivists who would record and document the famous
Occupy Movement
The Occupy movement was an international populist socio-political movement that expressed opposition to social and economic inequality and to the perceived lack of "real democracy" around the world. It aimed primarily to advance social and econo ...
.
Graduates and students of the Moving Image Archives and Preservation Program acknowledged the importance of the Occupy Wall Street movement alongside the significance of the digital artifacts associated with the movement. Under Besser's leadership, they developed the Activist Archivists and began planning on preserving the content. The fundamental objective of this effort was to convey the digital preservation information effectively and concisely. Besser's team articulated essential pieces of text and published them on postcards; they distributed those cards to the individuals in public places. In this way, they played their role in raising awareness about digital technology (
Digital humanities
Digital humanities (DH) is an area of scholarly activity at the intersection of computing or Information technology, digital technologies and the disciplines of the humanities. It includes the systematic use of digital resources in the humanitie ...
). For example, "Why Archive" postcards contained information about accountability and archives as proof to hold people in power accountable. The graduates and experts along with 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 the best practices that video activists can employ.
![Occupy Wall Street](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/95/Occupy_Wall_Street.jpg)
Additionally, the course material included the details of legal restrictions in seeking permission from the people to record their activities; it also dealt with the copyright policy. The objective was to save the creators' original work from being stolen. The course emphasized the idea of obtaining a license that will enable the source to store the content and make it accessible for the long term. The Occupy movement had 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 saving this digital material. At the time of the emergence of Activist Archivists, some suspicion surfaced. The movement had developed the archives of the working class, but it aimed to save the content of artifacts. 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
YouTube
YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second mo ...
, relevant to the movement. Some categories were developed like Celebrity Visits and "Clashes with Police." The archivists asked movement members to complete an online form pointing at the five most interesting videos. According to Besser, "
Tags (Unicode block)" was where metadata started. Plenty of educational material was made available about technical metadata with different illustrations. To facilitate users, Besser worked with his team to develop an app for users' phones to fill the form, which could instantly record a things such as date, time, and
Global Positioning System
The Global Positioning System (GPS), originally Navstar GPS, is a satellite-based radionavigation system owned by the United States government and operated by the United States Space Force. It is one of the global navigation satellite sy ...
location and update it with video or photo.
Besser has always supported the idea of collection metadata right from the beginning when digital content was created.
He believed that getting the community members to develop metadata for sharing files over the internet may cause some components to be removed. The problem may arise at the time of downloading or uploading the files to the specific websites. Practically, with the app, Besser attempted to foster effective metadata practices within the community. According to Besser, the process needs automation. For institutions, ingestion of substantial amounts of digital work will be unlikely for memory institutions. Likewise, cultural institutions would not have the resources to integrate metadata and to collect enormous amounts of work added by the thousands of people. The experiences of Archive Activists with the occupy movement depicts the situation of archivists in the future. The archivists will experience a large quantity of material contributed by users.
The archivists are likely to encounter inconsistency in data, and there will be a 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 archivists in the initial phase of the event. The archivists are the ones who uses their skills to impact the behavior of the content creator. Besser focuses on the outreach of the Activists Archivists; he indicated that his team members have taken up the small things, and they all worked with the locals. Besser 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 the team has attempted to create more sustainability in the field.
Besser is well known for his habit of wearing only
t-shirt
A T-shirt (also spelled tee shirt), or tee, is a style of fabric shirt named after the T shape of its body and sleeves. Traditionally, it has short sleeves and a round neckline, known as a ''crew neck'', which lacks a collar. T-shirts are general ...
s, and for maintaining a t-shirt database. A number of his classes used the t-shirt database as a cataloging and metadata practicum, cataloging t-shirts into the database with appropriate metadata.
Awards
* 1995, Outstanding Information Studies Teacher of the Year,
American Society for Information Science
The Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) is a nonprofit membership organization for information professionals that sponsors an annual conference as well as several serial publications, including the ''Journal of the Asso ...
* 2009, "Pioneers of Digital Preservation", Library of Congress
Works
*
See also
*
List of archivists
This is a list of archivists. An archivist is an information professional who assesses, collects, organizes, preserves, maintains control over, and provides access to records and archives determined to have long-term value. Some of the people list ...
Notes
External links
Howard Besser's website*
Museum Educational Site Licensing Project papers, 1983, 1992–1999, undated, bulk 1996–1998. Getty Research Institute, Research Library. Los Angeles, California.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Besser, Howard
1950s births
American archivists
Film educators
People from Berkeley, California
Tisch School of the Arts faculty
University of California, Berkeley School of Information alumni
University of California, Berkeley School of Information faculty
Living people
Articles containing video clips