Santiago Lyon is the Head of Advocacy and Education for the Adobe-led Content Authenticity Initiative, working to combat misinformation through digital content provenance. 

He has 40 years of experience in photography as an award-winning photojournalist, photo editor, media executive and educator. 

As a photographer for Reuters and the Associated Press for 20 years he won multiple photojournalism awards for his work between 1989-1999 where he photographed 9 wars on 4 continents.

In 2003/2004 he was a Nieman Fellow in journalism at Harvard University before being named VP/Director of Photography at the Associated Press, a position he held until 2016. 

Under his direction the AP won three Pulitzer Prizes for photography as well as multiple other major photojournalism awards around the world. 

In 2012 he was a Sulzberger Fellow at Columbia University and was Chair of the Jury for the 2013 World Press Photo contest. 

Lyon serves on the board of directors of the Eddie Adams Workshop and the advisory board of the VII Foundation. 

He also teaches regularly at the International Center of Photography in New York.

Santiago Lyon, a seasoned expert in photojournalism and digital content verification, presents an insightful overview of two pioneering initiatives: the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) and the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA). Lyon elucidates how these initiatives collaborate to develop industry standards and tools that empower creators, publishers, and consumers to verify the authenticity of digital media. By leveraging cryptographic signatures and metadata, CAI and C2PA aim to establish a transparent and secure ecosystem that enhances trust in authentic digital content.

Alice Plutino

Dr. Alice Plutino earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Università degli Studi di Milano in 2021. She currently holds a MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Amsterdam’s Faculty of Media Studies, where she leads the DREAM-Film project (Democratising Research and Restoration of Audiovisual Media and Film). Her research encompasses Color Science, Colorimetry, Image Enhancement, Image Digitization, and Archiving, with a particular focus on Cultural Heritage applications. She is the author of the acclaimed book “Tecniche di Restauro Cinematografico” and has published numerous papers in both national and international journals and conferences. She serves as an Adjunct Professor at both Università degli Studi di Milano and the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, where she teaches digital film restoration and digital preservation. In addition to her academic and research roles, she is vice president of the Italian Color Group (Gruppo del Colore), deputy editor of the Color Culture and Science Journal (CCSJ), vice-coordinator of Division 1, and coordinator of Division 8 of NC CIE Italy.

Visit her personal website: https://aliplu.github.io/

Cinema film digitization is a rapidly evolving field that blends technological innovation with cultural preservation. This presentation explores current research on the digitization of cinema, focusing on the intersection of film preservation, restoration, and technological advancements. Through an analysis of the parallels and contrasts between cinema and photographic digitization and restoration, I will highlight both shared challenges and unique considerations within these disciplines.

Key areas of discussion include groundbreaking research in the accurate inversion of film negatives to positives, ensuring fidelity to the original material. Additionally, I will explore how conservation science principles are applied to enhance the digitization and restoration processes, maintaining authenticity and cultural value. Finally, the presentation will address methodologies for assessing the quality of digitization and restoration, ensuring that the outcomes align with archival standards and artistic integrity.

We believe that by implementing the image quality process metadata, as a new feature in the established IPTC Photo Metadata standard, in conjunction with the use of descriptive metadata fields, the possibilities within CAI/C2PA could be extended.
With the use of ISO 19264-1 standard, we can determine results of the transformation outcome from physical format to digital format for our collections. Did we lose something on the way? The imaging quality process metadata is of vital importance to establish trustworthy, and tracking authenticity and provenance.
The use of material specific metadata fields brings information regarding the physical description, the provenance, and the origin of the content to the end user. To secure or regulate if, or how the digital collections can be data mined, the data mining field within the IPTC Photo Metadata standard can be used. In short, there are new opportunities for implementing existing standards, with new updates for a more robust metadata approach in cultural heritage imaging. A discussion on technical metadata best practices is needed, and hopefully the presentation could be one step to continue this discussion within our community.

Rachel Senese Myers

Rachel Senese Myers is the Digital Projects Coordinator at Georgia State University (GSU) in Atlanta, Georgia and manages the Digital Projects Team within the Library.  Digital Projects is responsible for the digitization of archival and special collections materials, processing of AV assets, metadata creation, and management of GSU’s digital collections platform.  She is also a co-manager for the University Library’s digital preservation platform where she oversees the management and preservation of the digitized collections.  Prior to working at Georgia State University, she was the Cleveland Digital Public Library Coordinator at Cleveland Public Library in Ohio.  She also currently serves as the Co-Coordinator for the Digital Library Federation (DLF)’s Cost Assessment Interest Group.   She received her BA in Anthropology, Classical Humanities, and Italian Studies and her MLIS from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Lisa Vallen

Lisa Vallen is the Southern Labor Archivists and the Instruction Coordinator at Georgia State University Special Collections & Archives.  As the Southern Labor Archivist, Vallen is Responsible for the stewardship and preservation of over 12,000 linear feet of archival material, donor relations, selecting and acquiring collections, managing oral history projects, and securing external funding. Ms. Vallen has nine years of experience in libraries and archives.  She has her Master of Science in Library and Information Sciences from the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign.  Throughout her career Ms. Vallen has raised over $800,000 in grant funds from multiple funders.

The AFL-CIO is not just a labor union, it is an organization that is an active agent for change and has and continues to advocate for civil rights, equality, and health and safety for all its members. In 2020, Georgia State University, in partnership with the University of Maryland, applied for a CLIR Hidden Collections grant to digitize the papers of the AFL-CIO Civil Rights Department within the Southeast Division and the National office. This presentation will cover the execution of the project, tell some of the stories we’ve uncovered, and detail how this project has grown the digitization program at Georgia State University.

Peter Siegel is the Director and founder of DT Heritage. Dedicated to the cultural heritage community, he has developed a series of reprographic and book capture benches and a reprographic camera system as well as film scanning solutions and accessories that are purpose-built to meet the specialized needs of cultural institutions. This was a natural fit, as he has served the not-for-profit community for over 25 years.

Before coming to Digital Transitions over 10 years ago, Peter was the Head of Digital Imaging and Photography for Harvard Art Museums and Fine Arts Library. Here he planned and implemented the modernization of the entire imaging lab and photography services department by designing and integrating image capture technologies for image creation, management, and permanence. Peter was also the Director of Digital Imaging at the American Museum of Natural History. Peter was responsible for all aspects of the Digital Imaging program and created an image database containing over 270,000 high-resolution images from collections, catalog ledgers, and archives. He also incorporated and designed digital imaging technologies to integrate other museum collections.

Peter’s history working in the cultural heritage community is why DT Heritage has become the country’s leading provider of high-end digitization solutions. His true understanding of the importance of reliable equipment with a dependable technical support team standing behind their products is why we stand out and have partnered with Phase One, the worldwide leader in digital imaging technology.