Breaking Apart The Union Catalog — Vol. 1

29 September 2009

Google Books has been in the news a lot lately, and that inevitably prompts me to thinking about one of the main things people love and/or hate about Google: The centralization or unification of, more or less, everything. Communication, research, education, work, home, personal management, etc. It is not my place nor my interest to argue the relative beneficence or malevolence of Google. There are plenty of voices doing that, and plenty of people trying to work within or outside the system to help keep it honest. What my mind always comes back to in relation to this topic is the issue of centralization within the practice of archiving and preservation.

The advent and increase of computing tools in libraries and archives has held great promise for significantly increasing capabilities for the storage, discovery, and access of assets, whether they be digitized or not. Those of us that remember performing research projects before the widespread availability of online databases — or even before the subscriptions and portals for them became more streamlined — can attest to the partial fulfillment of this promise. There have of course been many other pushes throughout history to create a centralized repository of information or knowledge well before the digital age. The Oxford English Dictionary, the encyclopedic list of encyclopedias, national libraries, etc. We could be high-minded and discuss the human urge to organize and contain in order to deal with the uncertainties, the multiplicities, the messiness of existence. Or we could discuss it more in terms of efficiency — sure the chase of research is fun, but it can be a luxury to have the time to search so many sources and limits advancements to do work that has already been done before.

What we can say is that, though the universe tends towards decay, the human mind tends to turn away from it and back towards unity. However, we are a frustrating bunch and more often than not turn heel in the face of unity as well. I say this because, in spite of the beautiful dream of a union catalog, and despite the many well-intended and well-organized attempts over the years to create some sort of union catalog, the actualization of the dream and implementation of the various attempts have been a mixed-bag of results. At some point, the plan seems to lose steam or support or gets superseded by something else. Might this be a problem with the specific project, or might this be an inherent result of any such attempt?

Over the next few posts on this topic I will be looking at the issue of union catalogs in relation to media archives: What are some of the difficulties involved in establishing one? What other union catalogs have succeeded and what has contributed to their success? Is this an attainable idea or even a good one? And what kinds of solutions exist that archives can apply for internal use at the least, or for positioning themselves for the future? We may or may not gain a clue as to how to design and implement the ultimate union catalog, but we will definitely gain a better understanding of the process and how planning and execution relate to any project within the archive, whether large scale or not.

— Joshua Ranger

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Creating Content / Creating Context

23 September 2009

Film is the great American medium. When it came along, we were still struggling to attain approval of our literary and cultural production from a withholding Europe. As an epicenter of the creation of the film industry, we were able to develop “languages” and styles that have become a major part of defining what filmic expression is. Among current filmmakers, the documentarian Ken Burns and director Quentin Tarantino could arguably be considered two of the greatest distillers of American culture within this medium, even though they take such radically different stylistic approaches. While their base approach is much the same – the consumption and reworking of archival/cultural materials – their presentational styles reflect the differences in what they are trying to accomplish. Both men work under a system of appropriation. Burns appropriates the actual materials, whereas Tarantino appropriates the aura of the materials — styles, themes, the experience associated with viewing film…

In this clip from Burns’ upcoming documentary The National Parks: America’s Best Idea airing on PBS we see his standard use of archival materials: panning across period images paired with a dramatic reading of some writing from around the same period or a commentator’s gloss on the topic:

Of course, Burns leans on the aura of the materials as well, but he is concerned with the kind of aura we typically associate with the Archive — the sense of uniqueness, of history, of a piece of the past preserved that we grasp at to try and understand but that remains not entirely tangible. Leaving any critiques of this method aside, we can see that one result of his style is the transference of the aura of the archive to his own work. That warm feeling we have towards the historical building blocks of the piece extend to the work as a whole. This is one of the great values of archival materials that more and more filmmakers are relying on — the use of items that often have less expensive licensing fees compared to commercial works but that have an immediate cache of seriousness and high culture.

Compare this then to Tarantino, especially his most recent works which have become less and less homage as their elements of pastiche have increased. Compare this clip from Jackie Brown which recalls 70s heist and exploitation films:

with the preview from Kill Bill that throws together incongruous styles from Kung Fu, Japanese crime, and Anime films (for starters):

The ultimate expression of this manner of appropriation is Grindhouse (with Robert Rodriguez and others), an attempt to recreate a very specific movie-going experience of viewing a B-movie double feature in a run-down theatre, complete with “damaged” film, missing reels, previews, and plenty of gore & sex (though you do have to provide your own broken seats, sticky floors, and disturbing odors).

In the same way Burns does, Tarantino relies on extra-textual meaning to add context/depth to his work. This is a basic tenet of art, but, depending on one’s own proclivities, Tarantino’s approach may be seen as either less significant than Burns’ (it relies on pop culture, not serious culture) or more significant than Burns’ (it relies on low culture, not more canonical historiography).

We could perhaps, then, almost consider Tarantino the more austere Archivist as compared to Burns. In our field, in trying to navigate some of the ideologies adopted from traditional archival theory of paper-based works, we deal daily with the conflict of preservation of the original item versus preservation of only the content. This issue is being pushed to the fore with the increase in the creation and preservation of digital assets. In one approach, part of preserving the original is the idea of preserving the experience — the look, the feel, the great intangible whatsit. Without content we would not have memory or history, but it is often the emotional/experiential connection to the past that drives preservation efforts. There are many reasons to preserve, and many ways to advocate for a collection. Is there a single “stylistic” approach that works?

— Joshua Ranger

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