Howard Besser
He conducted extensive research in image databases, multimedia operation, digital library, and social and cultural influence of the latest Information Technology.
[2] Besser is a prolific writer and speaker, and has consulted with many governments, educational institutions, and arts agencies on digital preservation matters.
[3] Besser has been actively contributing at the international level to build metadata and upgrade the quality of the cultural heritage community.
[6] Besser grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and earned a Bachelor's degree in 1976 from the University of California, Berkeley.
It was a significant initiative to collect images alongside metadata from numerous cultural institutes and transformed them into digital technology for the users of university campus networks.
[10] For the past twenty seven years, he has been using the internet as a significant component of instructional assistance, saving teaching materials and curriculum on the World Wide Web.
One of Besser's many projects was in 2011 when he organized a group of librarians called the Activist Archivists who would record and document the famous Occupy Movement.
[14] Besser's team articulated essential pieces of text and published them on postcards; they distributed those cards to the individuals in public places.
Additionally, the course material included the details of legal restrictions in seeking permission from the people to record their activities; it also dealt with the copyright policy.
The course emphasized the idea of obtaining a license that will enable the source to store the content and make it accessible for the long term.
The archivists worked alongside New York University Tamiment Library to crowd-source the range of videos obtained from YouTube, relevant to the movement.
Likewise, cultural institutions would not have the resources to integrate metadata and to collect enormous amounts of work added by the thousands of people.
Besser also sponsored a session of the Association of Moving Image Archivists in December 2012 in which people discussed various dimensions of community archiving.
