The British Columbia Audiovisual Inventory Initiative (BC AVII): A Survey of Audiovisual Materials and Playback Machines in BC
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In British Columbia today, thousands of important historical and cultural audiovisual (AV) items are in danger of being lost forever to degradation and obsolescence. AV materials are valuable to researchers and the general public alike, and the value will only increase as society becomes less text-based and more digital. In order to devise a provincial strategy for preservation of these at-risk materials, it is important to first know their quantity and condition, as well as what the perceptions and attitudes are towards acquiring, cataloguing, digitizing and preserving them. With this goal in mind, the University of British Columbia Archives and the Audio-Visual Heritage Association of British Columbia (AVBC) partnered to create a high-level inventory and get a snapshot of the current status of AV in BC. An online survey was designed and sent out to BC memory institutions. 252 valid responses were received, with 65.9% belonging to institutions identifying as Libraries, Archives, Museums or Historical Societies. Cost was perceived as the largest barrier for the preservation of AV materials, followed by equipment, time, resources, etc. Many expressed frustration at a lack of prioritization for these materials within their institutions, leading to a complicated cycle of degradation that ultimately results in the materials being left in boxes collecting dust. Another troubling finding was the large number of materials in unknown condition and institutions often not having the resources or expertise to even know where to start with the preservation process. Several recommendations were made for next steps in developing a strategy for saving AV in BC. These included forming a task force to develop a strategic plan, developing a centralized provincial response, providing online community support, and hosting training and education workshops. On the ground level, memory institutions have been doing what they can with the resources available, however with more awareness and support, AV preservation needs in BC are attainable.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".