Instructors:  Brendan Coates

When: Thursday, July 16th, 1pm – 4pm (EDT)

RSVP deadline: July 10th

Notify by: June 14th

Workshop Description: 

With the ever-increasing scale and complexity of digital archival collections, archivists need to adapt their tools, workflows, and processes to match. Command line tools offer a customizable and cost-effective way to meet some of these challenges.

This 3-hour workshop will cover the basics of the command line interface (CLI) with a focus on its use in audiovisual archival workflows and digital preservation. The command line software discussed will help archivists navigate their terminals, understand checksums and CRCs, create Bags per the BagIt specification, and introduce principles of scripting and automation for handling file data at scale.

This is an introductory course and users with no programming or command line experience are welcome; any archivist who routinely moves files, verifies metadata across systems, or works with audiovisual materials will learn techniques to improve their efficiency and gain familiarity with tools and workflows which take advantage of CLI capabilities. Users don’t need to have administrative privileges or the ability to install software on their local machines in order to participate. For users who can install software on their machines, there will be office hours prior to the workshop to go over any questions that arise during setup.

Instructor Bios:

Brendan Coates is a preservationist and native plant enthusiast living in Los Angeles, CA. He has been working to ensure the long-term stability and relevance of archival audiovisual materials since 2011, with a particular focus on oral histories, for which he’s contributed to programs at The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, The History Makers, and the Computer History Museum. He’s also designed digital preservation workflows and software integrations for The Smithsonian Library and Archives Audiovisual Media Preservation Initiative and worked on data migrations of hundreds of thousands of files. He’s a graduate of the University of Michigan’s School of Information, a winner of the James A. Lindner Prize, and contributed music and code to Black Room, by Cassie McQuater, the winner of the 2019 Independent Game Festival’s Nuovo Award.