Restoring/Repairing Media
Radon, a video essay by Robyn Schiff and Nick Twemlow
All Blackbird audio and video used to be hosted on VCU’s video server. Around volume 10, we were advised by the instituion to start using a different area of that server to deliver video through Flash. The video.vcu.edu server went down long before Flash was deprecated, but at the time, I was overwhelmed and did did not get all the video content moved to Kaltura.
In ongoing work with the Founders Archive, I will attempt to restore any broken or missing content where that is at all possible. This week, I restored the wonderful video essay by Robyn Shiff and Nick Twemlow titled “Radon.”
On behalf of the Founders Archive I posted an announcement of this restoration on the journal’s ongoing Facebook page, and on its Instagram account.
Of course, our promotion is also linked to that of the relaunched journal, as every page of the Founders Archive has an “open current issue” link, all of which were updated in the spring semester 2024. (After the migration of legacy content to blackbird-archive.vcu.edu by VCU Libraries and the forwarding filters put in place, all those “open current” links were returning 404s; that’s one of the first things we worked to mend at scale in the 43 issue archive.)
The plan is for the Founders Archive to use “throwback Thursdays” as a time to announce restored content, or suggested content to revisit. As we hear from educators using Blackbird content in their classrooms, we also hope to share their stories through social media as well.