Marshmallowing The Troops

Little known fact: I was a middle school Chubby Bunny champion. A moment of pride? Perhaps not, but when my only other award to that date was 2nd Place Most Interesting Cake in a Cub Scout cake bake off, I was eager to win something.

I have little doubt that the stirring Chubby Bunny competition has since been banned from schools nationwide and any record of it relegated to school newspaper archives…though I hope in my case it hasn’t been (I have never claimed that all archival materials are entirely benign or significant). For those unfamiliar with the particulars, the competitors in this event vie to see who can pack the most marshmallows in one’s mouth while maintaining the ability to fully vocalize “chubby bunny”.

Like I says…

I guess I have marshmallows on the mind (though not on the tongue) in part because I’ve almost made it through another October to April confluence of my formerly beloved holiday themed chocolate covered marshmallow treats (May to December romances ain’t got nothing quite so bittersweet as that relationship). The other reason is because I caught this little (Stay) puff piece on YouTube about The Marshmallow Test, an experiment where young children were presented with a marshmallow and then given the option of eating it or of waiting 15 minutes and then receiving an additional marshmallow:

Two things immediately struck me about this experiment — besides, that is, the memory sensation of gooey sugar melting on my tongue. First was the fact that in the original experiment referenced by the news story the children were tracked to age 18 and it was found that those who waited out the 15 minutes were more likely display the greater levels of self-discipline and focus that lead to life success than those who did not. I think this speaks very well to the idea that the ability to plan and conceptualize future events and goals is an integral part to one’s overall wellness or success. Second to stand out was the association in the results of the test with the idea of instant gratification, of the mindset that what can be gained now is worth more than a greater, extensible future gain that results from more immediate short term investment.

This mindset is a major hurdle in the advocacy and support for archiving and preservation funding. As the excellent Blue Ribbon Task Force report Sustainable Economics for a Digital Planet: Ensuring Long-Term Access to Digital Information points out (Read it! http://brtf.sdsc.edu/biblio/BRTF_Final_Report.pdf), there is great economic and cultural benefit to the preservation of materials. However, despite those benefits, there has been an overall lack of clearly defined statements outlining the value of preservation in ways that sufficiently incentivizes organizations to fund that work.

We feel it in our bones that preserving the cultural and historical record is important — that is why we became archivists in the first place — but the Big Idea capitonyms that drive us (History! The Future! Culture!), while important rallying points, often result in vague arguments for why it is Important to Preserve this Valuable Material. This passion is good, but when an organization is faced with mandates to increase revenues or cut budgets, they are going to grab that marshmallow off the plate, floor, or wherever they can find it in order to attain immediate goals, regardless of the feast of unseen marshmallows down the road that initial fluff could engender.

Our responsibility now is to articulate the reasons why the short-sighted approach to sustaining the use and quality of archival materials is wrong and what the quantifiable benefits of preservation are. These are not necessarily monetary benefits. Economics is a social science, and there are institutional benefits derived from reputation, from fulfilling mission statements, from providing education, and from other identifiable, classifiable achievements. It’s important to point out that this issue will not be addressed solely on an institution by institution basis. The bottom line is the bottom line. But there will also be the need for the incentive provided by a strong Public Policy that outlines practices, gives support, and develops the infrastructure or reasoning that enables organizations to adopt long term preservation strategies. The Blue Ribbon Task Force has hacked a trail through the brush. It’s our time to build on that.

— Joshua “chumby bummy” Ranger

A Distended Note On The Vagaries Of Access And Preservation

(A preliminary note to the following distended note: As a public response to the named article, this was written with a general audience in mind. Please add any forgiveness for basic seeming statements to the usual forgiveness requested for syntactical idiosyncracies.)

To The Editors of The New York Times,

The recent article on the International Amateur Scanning League (“Duplicating Federal Videos for an Online Archive”) was certainly a textbook case of the networked distribution of a news story, seeping outwards through the archival community like a case of vinegar syndrome in a warm room of 1970s acetate stock. I’m sure many others, like myself, appreciate the impetus behind the actions of the IASL to duplicate and distribute DVD-based content from the collections at the National Archives and fully support the idea of the improved ability to access public domain materials. I did not see equal mention of the similarly inspired work done by The Library of Congress Flickr photostream (http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/) and YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/LibraryOfCongress), Smithsonian Folkways Radio (http://www.folkways.si.edu/explore_folkways/radio.aspx), and other fine efforts. Oh, The National Archives has a YouTube channel as well (http://www.youtube.com/user/usnationalarchives), but that is neither here nor there (rather, the internet is everywhere).

Getting back off focus, what I feel should be pointed out regarding the work that IASL and others are doing is that access is one reale in the archiving treasure chest of pieces of eight. Another segment is preservation, which itself is a multi-faceted strategy of efforts that includes, among other issues, proper storage, conservation, and transfers or duplications in a series of formats destined for different purposes. It is under this scheme that DVDs or low-resolution videos (like on YouTube) are created as access copies of the original materials. What is considered the preservation master, the item that is stored away for safety, is more typically a film (very stable medium) or uncompressed digital video or some other not terribly easy to access format. While it is possible that at some point in the future only the access copies might remain and they would be considered the de facto preservation master, it’s not really a great idea to use DVDs or low-res video as the main focus of a preservation strategy. Personally I wouldn’t really want to rely on that scratched up copy of The Gods Must Be Crazy IV: Crazy in Hong Kong or a variable quality, cut-up YouTube version of Teen Witch as the sole formats to maintain my cultural heritage.

Continued access to audiovisual materials is dependent on preservation efforts, but preservation doesn’t really mean much without the ability to access. Archiving and preservation can result in flashy access-related outcomes but, as the Times article attempts to define it, they are often achieved at the expense of seemingly unexciting processes*. Preservation work can certainly be a slog at times – as is the case with certain aspects of any career – but it is much more complicated and engaging than Insert Disc Here And Turn Knob For Prize. We audiovisual archivists are proud of our professionalism and of the work we do, and are pleased to see that other people think it’s a cool enough field that they want to emulate us in their free time.

— Joshua Ranger

*(A derivative point in style and substance: Considering the extensive work NARA has done developing guidelines for architectural, storage, and environmental standards in archives, I’m not so sure of the need for anyone to have to ‘dust off’ a DVD before duplicating it as if it were some musty, forgotten item buried in the attic, as the Times would suggest. Thank you.)

Awarding The Unseen

This is not a rant about how less commercial films get little to no Oscar love. As a boy growing up I lived and died by the daily fate of the underdog Portland Trailblazers (especially in their many conflicts with the hated Hollywood cool of the Lakers), but at some point I had to mellow out and accept the minor historical significance of such events…Though just the mention of A.C. Green still gets my blood boiling red.

Nor is this a rave for Best Picture nominee The Blind Side. I haven’t seen it myself, but my dad really enjoyed it. I can’t call that an endorsement as I’m not so sure I agree with many of his cinematic tastes (sorry, dad, still haven’t watched the DVD of Tombstone you sent), but then again, I’m not so sure I would be going to things like Hausu at the IFC or W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism at BAM without having been exposed to his glee at certain films (Raising Arizona, So I Married an Ax Murderer) or without my mom’s feeding of a precocious five-year-old’s interest in Hitchcock, Godzilla, and Universal horror films.

Rather, after looking over this weekend’s nominees, and inspired by Virginia Heffernan’s recent New York Times essay about sound editing (“Sound Logic“), I began thinking about the unseen features of film.

What exactly is unseen in this what we term the most visual of media? Well, following from Heffernan’s piece, there is the obvious influence of the audio elements of a movie. These have a definite effect on the “viewing” experience, though that effect is obviously overlooked, seeing as how the Academy has to haul out the chalkboard every year during that part of the awards presentation to explain why sound design and editing matter.

But there are a whole host of other unseen factors that are a part of our ability to enjoy and access films, ranging from the crew to the film developers (or video migrators[?]) to projectionists. And if you really wanted to burrow down, you could look at the distribution channels and delivery persons and gas station attendants, lens manufacturers, raisin chocolate coaters, personal vegan chef/yoga instructor to the movie star’s dog… Truly, the film industry touches every segment of the American economy!

Seriously, though, there is a lot of unglorified (and unglamorous) works that goes on to produce and maintain the magic of the moving pictures, not the least of which is archiving and preservation. (Sorry. I love my field, but there isn’t a lot of pizazz I can impress people at cocktail parties with in discussing the normalization of first name / last name syntax.)

The simple wrap-up here is the warm fuzzy of, “Hey, we’re all winners and deserve our recognition too,” but that’s the Hollywood ending. Rather, and perhaps this is just a personal outlook meant for my own edification, there may be something positive to being “unseen” in the now. We do our work and focus on the day-to-day. Current cultural recognition does the same, unable to see the long term picture while it is awarding the moving pictures from last year. Our advantage is that we perform the Daily with an eye for the future, with the idea that the results of our work will help maintain a knowledge of the past and our present, a knowledge that will help later generations “see” what is no longer visible to them and what was not necessarily apparent to us.

With that in mind then, ultimately people will see that Sam Bowie vs. Michael Jordan was not such a clearcut pick at the time, that Goobers tasted better than they sound, and, perhaps, that Tombstone is the finest example of the Western genre ever produced.

— Joshua Ranger

Chris Lacinak To Address Blue Ribbon Task Force, Time-Based Art Colloquium

AVPS founder and President Chris https://www.weareavp.com/team/chris-lacinak/Lacinak has been invited to speak at two prestigious media preservation events in Washington, DC in the up-coming weeks.

On Thursday, March 18 Chris will present during a day of talks as part of the Collaborations in Conserving Time-Based Art Colloquium co-sponsored by The Hirshhorn Museum and the Lunder Conservation Center, Smithsonian Institution. The Colloquium will bring together “conservators, artists, curators, exhibition designers, and audiovisual specialists in a series of case studies about collaboration, designed to provoke debate about how we have cared for these works thus far.” Chris’ presentation will address digital file-based audiovisual content and the new challenges and strategies for accessioning and managing that content for preservation and access processes that include acquisition, identification, inspection, documentation, storage, preservation, administration and exhibition.

Other speakers on Thursday will include representatives from the Museum of Modern Art, Anthology Film Archives, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art. The series of panels is free and open to professionals with an interest in conserving time-based art, but advanced registration is required. More information can be found at http://conservetimebasedart.eventbrite.com/

On Thursday, April 1 Chris will be addressing the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access at their symposium A National Conversation on the Economic Sustainability of Digital Information. The BRTF-SDPA was formed in 2007 to explore the challenges to the economic sustainability of digital preservation with an eye towards addressing the requirements for “new models for channeling resources to preservation activities; efficient organization that will make these efforts affordable; and recognition by key decision-makers for the need to preserve, with appropriate incentives to spur action.”

The BRTF-SDPA recently released the report on their findings, Sustainable Economics for a Digital Planet:
Ensuring Long-Term Access to Digital Information, and will be conducting the Symposium to further the conversation and focus on “one of the most pressing issues in today’s Information Age: identifying practical solutions to the economic challenges of preserving today’s deluge of valuable digital information.”

The event will feature four “Conversations” with distinguished experts from the academic, private, and public sectors. Chris will be participating in the “Conversation About Commercially-owned Cultural Content” with a special representative from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Other Symposium panelists include Thomas Kalil, Deputy Director for Policy in the Office of Science & Technology Policy, Executive Office of the President of the United States; Daniel E. Atkins, Former Director of the National Science Foundation’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure; Wayne Clough, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution; William G. Bowen, President Emeritus, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; and Hal R. Varian, Chief Economist, Google.

Further details will be announced as they become available. Check out the entire slate at http://brtf.sdsc.edu/symposium.html.