Howard Besser
Howard Besser | |
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Academic work | |
Main interests | Information Commons |
Howard Besser (born c. 1952) is a scholar of
Biography
Besser grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and earned a Bachelor's degree in 1976 from the University of California, Berkeley.[7] 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.[8]
Besser was on the faculty of
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 focused on integrating critical theory concepts and design issues.[2] He worked for several years to develop and test new ways for incorporating technology in teaching.[10] 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.
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
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.[16] 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.[17] 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, 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.[18] 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 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.[2] 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.[19] 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.[20] 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-shirts, 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.[6]
Awards
- 1995, Outstanding Information Studies Teacher of the Year, American Society for Information Science
- 2009, "Pioneers of Digital Preservation", Library of Congress[21]
Works
- Besser, Howard; Trant, Jennifer (1995). Introduction to imaging: issues in constructing an image database. California: The Getty Art History Information Program. OCLC 807013081.
See also
Notes
- ^ "Howard Besser", Tisch faculty profile.
- ^ a b c "Digital Pioneers". digitalpioneers.library.du.edu. Retrieved 2021-12-17.
- ^ Drewes, Jeanne (2018). "Howard Besser interviewed about his work in software manufacturing and digital preservation [sound recording]".
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- ^ a b "Howard Besser", Digital Preservation Pioneers, Library of Congress (Interview, last visited Aug. 9, 2012)
- ^ a b 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.
- ^ "Howard Besser". besser.tsoa.nyu.edu. Retrieved 24 July 2017.
- )
- doi:10.18452/23506.
- ^ "Digital Pioneers". digitalpioneers.library.du.edu. Retrieved 2021-10-09.
- ISSN 0024-2594.
- ^ "Howard Besser's Homepage". besser.tsoa.nyu.edu. Retrieved 2021-12-17.
- S2CID 114422891.
- ^ "Howard Besser (Ph.D. 1997), Activist Archivists, and Digital Preservation". UC Berkeley School of Information. Retrieved 2021-12-17.
- )
- ISSN 0360-9081.
- ^ "Howard Besser (Ph.D. 1997), Activist Archivists, and Digital Preservation". UC Berkeley School of Information. Retrieved 2021-12-17.
- ISSN 2164-8034.
- S2CID 153741622.
- ^ "Digital Preservation Pioneers – Digital Preservation (Library of Congress)". www.digitalpreservation.gov. Retrieved 2017-07-24.
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.