Our group has successfully migrated all of Joe’s reachable digital assets (one drive is currently down for the count…  Zach is contacting MITH about possible remedies) to the largest external drive they currently have, a 4TB Western Digital MyBook. Lauren plans to run our inventory software on it this Thursday before class to create an excel file detailing every file and folder that exists. Hopefully after that we can find some clever ways of re-sorting the many fields to start tapping some actionable metrics out of the inventory, such as how much disc space they fill up in a semester, and with what type of work predominantly. These are both pieces of information that will be vital to the recommendations we plan to leave with Joe’s regarding how they should plan and budget for the basic maintenance of their storage environment, as well as the file format choices they make to maximize longevity of their project files.

In truth, the file format of finished student work is actually much less challenging than Joe’s commitment to keeping all student project files for at least two years. Updates in software occur so rapidly now that old project files for After Effects, Premiere, Audition, iMovie, Final Cut, and others sometimes can’t be opened in the new version. Usually the new version allows a conversion to take place, but not all filters render the same way, and occasionally some are deleted. I am not aware of a solution to this issue. These are highly proprietary formats and I suspect some risk may simply be inherent in the promise to retain these project files.

This past week I took a first crack at establishing an underlying folder structure for Joe’s to use going forward. The Events documentation portions I’m pretty confident will suite their needs. I modeled them on the organizational system we use at MITRE for housing our event photography. The system has worked well for us in a multi-shooter environment. The keyword taxonomy we’ve worked up for use in Adobe Bridge roughly mirrors this system as well, though Joe’s is a bit simpler than the one we use at MITRE. The student work areas of the folder structure on the other hand bear a great deal more group discussion, as well as collaboration with Sierra, who after all, will be the one that either maintains the structure or abandons it.

Probably the biggest thing I’m struggling with at the moment is what to recommend to Joe’s for hardware changes. Our whole group agrees that working off of a centralized server would greatly simplify their workflow and preservation efforts. And I have no problem with offering that as one possible goal to work towards. However, that kind of server space and the high speed network that would necessarily accompany it in order to allow video editing will undoubtedly make that a long term goal at best. I would like to offer them a “minimum effort” option that is achievable in the short term and offers them at least some measure of increased security and/or performance. So far I’m undecided on what the easiest path forward would be.