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Audiovisual archiving education programs prepare individuals to care for film, video, and digital media collections found in cultural heritage institutions, such as libraries, archives, and museums. These programs combine traditional graduate education with significant experiential components to train students for work with moving images and sound material in archival and museum settings. Audiovisual archivist training requires a three-pronged approach that combines competencies drawn from the cognitive, affective, and psychomotor learning domains, blending conceptual, historical, and theoretical knowledge and soft skills such as communication and project management with training in hand and other sensory skills. Audiovisual education programs tend to be less explicit about requirements in expert handling and repair work (often referred to in the conservation profession as "hand skills"), sensory skills, and soft skills, however. While cognitive competencies are often stated directly through program documents such as course descriptions and syllabi, psychomotor and affective competencies tend to not be directly stated or are deprioritized in favor of development of cognitive competencies. This perceived gap establishes the need for making affective and psychomotor educational objectives more explicit in program curricula and requirements. In particular, learning objectives in the psychomotor domain have been neglected, which is problematic for a field that requires professionals to possess significant manual dexterity and sensory skills. This paper also makes the case for the design of a field-wide competency framework that accurately reflects the roles of the three learning domains and makes them equally essential for professional preparation in the audiovisual archiving profession.

An editorial is presented on marking out the area of digital humanities (DH). Topics include suggesting further areas of study such as analysis of conferences and citations as well as diachronic representations of the ever-developing landscape of DH; and developing an integrated digital hermeneutics workflow combining research approaches from computer science and the humanities.

Audiovisual archiving education programs prepare individuals to care for film, video, and digital media collections found in cultural heritage institutions, such as libraries, archives, and museums. These programs combine traditional graduate education with significant experiential components to train students for work with moving images and sound material in archival and museum settings. Audiovisual archivist training requires a three-pronged approach that combines competencies drawn from the cognitive, affective, and psychomotor learning domains, blending conceptual, historical, and theoretical knowledge and soft skills such as communication and project management with training in hand and other sensory skills. Audiovisual education programs tend to be less explicit about requirements in expert handling and repair work (often referred to in the conservation profession as “hand skills”), sensory skills, and soft skills, however. While cognitive competencies are often stated directly through program documents such as course descriptions and syllabi, psychomotor and affective competencies tend to not be directly stated or are deprioritized in favor of development of cognitive competencies. This perceived gap establishes the need for making affective and psychomotor educational objectives more explicit in program curricula and requirements. In particular, learning objectives in the psychomotor domain have been neglected, which is problematic for a field that requires professionals to possess significant manual dexterity and sensory skills. This paper also makes the case for the design of a field-wide competency framework that accurately reflects the roles of the three learning domains and makes them equally essential for professional preparation in the audiovisual archiving profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The central focus of this response paper is on how preservation programs can position themselves to prepare moving image archivists. Most institutions, aside from larger university-based or museum-based archives, have little interest in sustaining analog moving image or sound formats and are primarily focused on transferring that material to digital formats to provide access. Given this scenario, the author considers whether stand-alone moving image archives programs can survive, or if interdisciplinary preservation programs will be a better alternative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Semantic relatedness is an important measure for search functionality and design in the 21st century. We envision that a 21st century search system should be able to accept as a "query" a sample document or object - and return results which are "like this" or "related." Today, search systems that suggest "related results" do so based on the similarity of values in defined properties or bibliographic fields (e.g., faceted search using metadata values) or on high co-occurrence rates of query terms and full-text indexes. These search systems are commonly referred to as Similarity Search. For search systems to be able to support this capability in the future there must be a reliable mechanism for semantically identifying facets and values in the query document, and for calculating the semantic relatedness or similarity to other documents. The literature is rich with discussions of semantic relatedness and similarity measures. Among the measures discussed, semantic distance appears to hold the greatest promise for this future search capability. Semantic relatedness is a concept that has been treated in philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence and computational linguistics. This research approaches the concept of semantic distance from the computational linguistics and semantic analysis perspective, e.g., the degree of similarity or relatedness of two lexemes in a lexical resource. Semantic distance provides a more practical and quantitative approach to defining "similarity." In addition, this research expands the definition of a lexical resource to include: full text and text corpus, knowledge organization systems, and metadata structures for documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At this writing, the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic continues to challenge those of us who work in the cultural heritage and information sectors. The final article of this issue is "A Preliminary Study of Indonesian Academic Libraries Digital Disaster Preparedness", by Yeni Budi Rachman. This issue contains three feature articles on the topics of audiovisual digitization, digital library education, and digital disaster preparedness in academic libraries. [Extracted from the article]