On Thursday, May 20th, fifteen CAA members attended the Tips, Tricks, Successes & Lessons Learned virtual event. The guest speakers were Sara Chapman, the Executive Director of the Media Burn Archive, and Andy Meyer, the Director of the F.M. Johnson Archives and Special Collections at North Park University.

Andy started the event off and explained that he received a grant in order to deal with AV materials and the need for a technical inventory of the film collection. His presentation discussed the process of getting that technical inventory from an Excel spreadsheet into an EAD finding aid. He used Open Refine in order to accomplish this and shared his screen with attendees so they could get an idea of the project details, how everything worked, and the lessons he learned. 

Sara discussed both a trick and success dealing with virtual events Media Burn had hosted over the last year titled Virtual Talks with Video Activists. The focus was on making them interactive and to use the events to create community. She illustrated how she uses Streamlabs OBS, which is an open source software, in order to optimize Zoom for motion and the tricks she learned to make sure the software runs smoothly. Sara also played a short clip from one of the virtual talks so attendees could see how it worked.

Thank you to everyone who attended the virtual event and showed great interest in the talk with their comments and questions. A special thanks to Andy and Sara for taking the time to speak to CAA members!