Howard Besser is Professor of
Cinema Studies and Founding Director of the Moving Image
Archiving and Preservation masters degree program (MIAP) as well as Senior Scientist
for Digital Library Initiatives for NYU's Library. In
addition to teaching one to three MIAP courses per year, he
teaches a regular Cinema Studies course in Free
Culture
and Open Access, and has taught New
Media, Installation Art, and the Future of Cinema.
And he plans to teach a new course on Digital Video and The
State. In 2020 he is finishing up a $450,000
grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services
(IMLS) to train librarians as Privacy Advocates teaching
endangered communities about digital privacy issues, and in
2021 he will be starting a new $250,000 IMLS grant to further
extend the reach of the highly diverse 100 Privacy Advocates
already trained.
He is currently working on the tension between preservation
and privacy and between preservation and access within
collections of social media that tend to be the most revealing
of contemporary times (like tweets and Facebook postings as
part of social movements). His ongoing interest in film
distribution for the use of higher education has led to his
testimony before the US Copyright Office on what eventually
became the TEACH Act, 2 MIAP student theses, and his own
current work on issues involving faculty teaching with films
during the distance learning of a pandemic. Besser has always
been interested in historically neglected types of works and
historically neglected populaces. His prior research projects
have involved preserving the records of social movements,
digital public television, preserving and providing digital
access to dance performance, preserving difficult electronic
works, issues around copyright and fair use, Do-It-Yourself
media, and the changing nature of media with the advent of
digital delivery systems.
In 2003, he took early
retirement from his position as Professor at UCLA's School of Education
and Information Studies, where he taught and did
research on multimedia and image databases (particularly in
cultural institutions), digital library issues (particularly
around standards, longevity, intellectual property, and
metadata), the development of new ways to teach with
technology (including web-based instruction and distance
learning), information literacy, web design, and the social
and cultural impact of new information technologies. He is particularly interested
in design issues and the use of critical theory perspectives.
Besser is an international expert on new technologies in
libraries, museums, and archives, and has been active in
national and international efforts to develop metadata and
standards for the cultural heritage community.
He travels a lot, speaks frequently
at professional conferences, gives workshops on Image Databases or
on Metadata about half a dozen times a year, and consults for
libraries, museums, and other institutions. For several years he
served as co-chair of the American Library Association's Technology
& the Arts Interest Group (co-sponsored by the
Association of College & Research Libraries and the Library
Information Technology Association).
Social Effects of New Information
Technology
Versions of some of his papers and talks on the social effects of
new information resources:
The Transformation
of the Museum and the Way it's Perceived, draft of chapter
that appeared in Katherine Jones-Garmil (ed.), The Wired
Museum: Emerging Technology and Changing Paradigms,
Washington: American Association of Museums, 1996
The Shape of the 21st Century
Library in Milton Wolf et. al. (eds.), Information
Imagineering: Meeting at the Interface, Chicago: American
Library Association, pages 133-146
Was on the National Research Council/National Academy of
Sciences' Panel on Intellectual Property Rights and the Emerging
Information Infrastructure that authored The Digital
Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Age
(National Academy of Sciences Press, 2000)
Poland,
The
Making
and
Un-Making
of the News, by Howard Besser & Terry Downs, Berkeley:
Anti-Authoritarian Studies, 1983 (including both How Polish Workers Made the News,
and Poland in Black and White)
Since the 1990s Howard has been actively involved in developing and
testing new methods for using technology to teach. Some of
those efforts have focused on Distance-Independent Learning. Howard
edited a Perspectives issue
on distance education for the Journal of the American
Society for Information Science which appeared in Nov of 1996.
In Winter 1995 he taught a course on the Impact of
Multimedia and Networks in which students in both Ann Arbor
and Berkeley used a wide variety of technologies to interact with
one another both in class as well as to collaborate on
projects. In 1999 he co-taught a class with half the students
in Berkeley and the other half at UCLA. And in 2001 he
recorded a continuing education lecture on Distance Learning for an
American Society for Information Science & Technology continuing
education experiment.
Since Spring 1994 Howard has been using the Internet as the key
delivery system for instructional support, placing curricular
materials on the WorldWide Web, having students engage in online
discussion groups, and making students read the online work of
previous students and incorporate this work into their own Web
pages and online discussions. From 1997-99 he taught a
course in Good Web Design and directed a grant
project that hired students from his department to develop
well-designed online web-based delivery systems for course
materials for large undergraduate classes on the UC Berkeley
campus.
Howard helped found the Museum
Educational Site Licensing Project (MESL) as a way to
provide digital images for instruction. Recently he has been
examining the new instructional strategies being developed to
teach with these images. At Michigan Dr. Besser also worked both
to develop new curriculum that relied extensively on technology,
and he worked on design of instructional technology labs to
support extensive teaching with technology. Under a grant from the
Kellogg Foundation to the University of Michigan to revamp curriculum,
Howard chaired a subcommittee
that examined
the creation and design of digital documents, and another
committee that was designing a new Information Studies Media Lab.
Examples of Howard's innovative teaching include exercises incorporating repurposed
images to teach important properties being raised by the
WorldWide Web. He also regularly uses online
papers and projects from previous student work as starting
material for subsequent classes. In 1995 he was named
Outstanding Teacher of the Year by the American Society for
Information Science.
Education
as Marketplace, book chapter from Muffoletto, R., Knupfer,
N. (1993) Computers in education: Social, historical, and
political perspectives, New Jersey: Hampton Press. (online
access restricted to users within the UC Berkeley domain
Digital Libraries, Standards,
Metadata, & Longevity Activities
Howard is involved in a variety of activities around Digital
Libraries, Standards, and Longevity. He was a member of the group that created the
Dublin Core metadata standard (1995), and was the lead
convenor for the 3rd
major Dublin Core meeting (1996). He was part of a small
team that designed the first set of standards for Structural and
Administrative metadata (originally called Making of America 2,
now called the Metadata
Encoding and Transmission Standard). Howard was part of
a small committee that initiated the National Information Standards
Organization's efforts to create a standard for Technical Metadata for Image
files (Howard's
opening presentation | Howard's
meeting summary). He was a US representatives to the Metadata
Working Group of the National Science Foundation/European
Community sponsored Digital
Library Collaboratory (an 18-month effort to harmonize
divergent Digital Library research and practice from country to
country, as well as to create an internationally accepted future
research agenda) (1998-99). And he was a member of the Actors and Roles
Working Group of the US National Science Foundation and the
European Community's DELOS, creating a "Reference Models for Digital
Libraries: Actors and Roles" (2001-2003).
Since 1998 Howard has been a member of the California Digital
Library's Technical
Architecture and Standards Committee, which has written
extensive digital library standards. He supplements his
standards development work with extensive instructional and
advocacy activities, including scores of talks, workshops, and
mini-courses for academic and professional societies both in the
US and abroad.
Produced a variety of online and print documents that serve as
both conceptual and pragmatic guidelines for groups involved in
creating interoperable digital collections.
Co-author of Making
of
America
II
White Paper, and participant in the MOA2 project to define
structural and administrative metadata standards for digital
representations of photographs, photo albums, diaries,
letterbooks, and other archival materials (Sponsored by the Digital
Library Federation)
Participated in the development of the Dublin Core, the metadata
standard to describe Network Objects (first meeting sponsored by
NCSA and OCLC)
Produced a document on Standards
for Images (an effort that is being coordinated with both
the Coalition for Networked Information and the Computerized
Interchange of Museum Information)
Longevity
Maintains a set of links to
resources on Digital Longevity (including several articles
he's written on subtopics like preserving electronic art, and
longevity of moving image material)
Participant in Time
& Bits, a small meeting on longevity of digital
information organized by the Getty Information and Conservation
Institutes in association with Stuart Brand
Irv
Besser dies 5/7/97