Howard Besser

Interview Date: March 4, 2010

Summary:

Besser is a Professor of Cinema Studies and Director of the Moving Image Archive and Preservation Masters Degree (MD) program at NYU. Besser has a zero percent time appointment as Senior Scientist for Digital Initiatives at NYU’s Libraries, working on projects with the Dean of Libraries.

Besser has several degrees in Library and Information studies, a Masters degree, a certificate in bibliography of non-print media, and a PhD all from Berkley’s School of Librarianship and Library and Information Studies. Besser holds an undergraduate degree is in Padaphysics, the science of imaginary solutions.

Besser has an eclectic work background, working for 15 years at the Pacific Film Archive, a part of the University Art Museum in Berkeley. There, his work ranged from organizing the film stills collection to working on creating a computer based online cataloging system for Japanese films to designing a new calendar. He was involved in all types of computing work and projection. Besser worked for the Vice Chancellor of Berkley doing computing for the campus, where he was in charge of image database projects.

Besser has been a faculty member of library and information studies at University of Pittsburgh, University of Michigan, UCLA, and University of California-Berkley, and has been head of technology for the Canadian Center for Architecture, undoubtedly the premier architecture museum of the world.

In 1985 and the first half of 1986, Besser did a lot of work digitizing images in the areas of geography, art, and architecture. He and his colleagues developed a client/server interactive image query system (called image query) and publically showed it in May and June of 1986 at the annual meetings of the American Association of Museums (AAM) and the American Library Association (ALA). People were blown away because they’ve never seen high quality art images on a computer screen before nor a query system where you can put in certain attributes and get back images that fit these attributes. The system had a lot of use and answered some major questions in the world of digitization, like what types of attributes might people want to query on in a system like that? Or what type of functions does a user want? Besser quickly learned that it wasn’t enough for a user to merely get and have access to an image…users wanted to be able to zoom, link, or add own their own metadata to it.