Gettin’ Trashed

Ah, Memorial Day Weekend — the traditional beginning to the marketing of summer. In New York this means one thing: the city will now be overwhelmed by the invasive stench of garbage being baked and steamed by the heat and humidity. The other week some fresh-faced new college grads, probably out looking for their first apartment, walked by my window. A piece of conversation floated in, something about how the air in Brooklyn is the freshest and loveliest around.

I felt sorry for these kids, who apparently had grown up next to a sewage processing plant or the municipal dump. Or maybe I should have felt happy for them for moving somewhere new and sad for myself — during a recent trip back to Oregon a major event several times a day was simply standing outside and taking deep breaths.

Whatever the case, these thoughts reminded me of a Radiolab episode from a few years back about the archeology of trash (“The Greatest Hits of Ancient Garbage” July 29, 2007).

The main story was about the discovery of what turned out to be an ancient dumping ground in the Egyptian desert that contained around 1000 years of discarded items. Of course there were the requisite pottery shards and household items — the jelly jar drinking glasses and giant wooden spoon wall hangings of their day — but the major find was massive amounts of 2000 year old paper fragments. And this warn’t no Michener-by-the-pound or Diet for a Small Planets. No, these papers include contemporary anti-heroic responses to Homer, non-canonical or alternate versions to christian bible texts, and surprising forms of popular literature.

These discoveries present starkly different views to accepted knowledge and interpretation of the ancient world, opening up not only our knowledge of the past but also our understanding of the creation and transmission of culture. Is there something inherent in a cultural work like The Iliad that makes it ‘timeless’ and something that makes responsive or satiric literature too bound to a certain period to be memorable? Or is there some kind of guiding hand of a canon-forming elite that enforces their taste on the masses? Or is it just random fate that allows one thing to be maintained and passed down while other things fall by the wayside through no fault of their own? There is as much to learn in what we keep as there is in what we decide to discard.

There are obvious correlations here to selection in archives and the concept that we don’t always know what materials will be relevant to the future. However, I think there’s something else here that can be gleaned from thinking not about the content of what was found, but rather how exactly this great discovery was enabled. One thing to consider is that the great luxury of analog materials is the potential for persistence in spite of — or even because of — neglect. Here these papers were, sitting buried in sand for century upon century and yet, though it will take more than a lifetime to piece the fragments back together and translate them, the majority of the content will be readable or at least viewable. We will have no such luck with digital media. Think about the difficulty of trying to open files from 15 years ago and try to imagine letting your hard drive sit for 2000 years before accessing it again. Heck, I could create an InDesign file at home on CS4 and then take it to work and I wouldn’t be able to access the file on CS3.

This issue underscores the great need for having a proactive preservation plan for digital media, including format and codec selection, obsolescence monitoring, migration plans, well-formed metadata sets, and more. What this underscore underscores, however, is that there has been a lack of tools and guidelines for digital preservation that have kept up with the quickly shifting requirements and structures of media and systems. There have been some strides made lately (including [blush] some of our own efforts), and many organizations are hacking through this issue (such as NDIIPP, FADGI, Blue Ribbon Task Force, and others), but there’s still plenty that’s unsettled.

When contemplating the challenges of digital preservation, it feels like a struggle fought in quicksand, tiring and futile. A common reaction is, well let’s just move everything back to analog. I don’t think this is an option now. First, the access digital materials have created and the possibilities they hold are just too great… and the amount of space and infrastructure we would need to store everything created as physical materials is just too great to be feasible. That’s why there are trash heaps and garbage is shipped across state lines for deposit. Second, this is our moment as archivists, and as a society, to do something big, to identify a major problem and find the solution. We can no longer be that anonymous Egyptian who has a cultural impact by having stored his papyrus in the ‘circular file’. It’s time to make a commitment, take some action, and manage our digital materials the same way we know we can the analog. Our days may be like sands through the hourglass, but our lives have greater agency than that.

— Joshua Ranger

AVPS Goes Marching In To ARSC 2010

AudioVisual Preservation Solutions founder and president Chris Lacinak will be representing AVPS at the 44th Annual Association for Recorded Sound Collections Conference in New Orleans, May 19th-22nd. Friday morning Chris will be presenting with Dan Partridge of the Jazz Loft Project on the Artists & Repertoire: Jazz and Blues panel. Dan is a Jazz Loft Project Research Associate and the primary tape archivist on the collection, and Chris planned and performed the first preservation transfers of tapes from the Jazz Loft. They will discuss the history of the collection and the preservation work that has gone into finally making these culturally and historically important audio recordings accessible to researchers and jazz lovers.

In that afternoon’s Archives & Technology panel Metadata for Audio Preservation: Current & Emerging Strategies and Tools Chris will be presenting on the findings and conclusions of the ARSC Technical Committee’s Metadata Study, which includes testing and results enabled by the BWF MetaEdit tool. Developed by AVPS in association with the Federal Agencies Audio-Visual Working Group, BWF MetaEdit is an open source desktop application that facilitates singular and batch embedding, editing and parsing of metadata within Broadcast WAVE Format (BWF) files, significantly increasing the amount of control and access to functionality available for managing digital audio files. Recent NYU Moving Image Archiving & Preservation grad Walter Forsberg led the BWF MetaEdit/ARSC testing for AVPS. BWF MetaEdit is wrapping up beta testing now and is planned to be publicly released from the Working Group in June 2010. Ask us for a peak at BWF MetaEdit at the conference and keep an eye out for updates at www.digitizationguidelines.gov — and keep an eye out for Chris in New Orleans!

New PBCore Instantiationizer Instantiation

AudioVisual Preservation Solutions announces the release of PBCore Instantiationizer 1.2. PBCore Instantiationizer is part of a toolset for conforming extracted technical metadata to the PBCore 1.2.1 metadata standard instantiation element set. The automated approach to extraction and conformance of this element set allows for consistent application of standards to fields that require a strict level of control for usability while also relieving the burden from the cataloger to document what can be a large datasets that are often human-readable unfriendly.

The update of PBCore Instantiationizer to version 1.2 presents refinements that improve usability and user control. The core of the tool has been updated to support the most recent version of MediaInfo, 0.7.33. See the MediaInfo change log at http://mediainfo.sourceforge.net/Log for further details. Version 1.2 also offers better options for user-defined levels of verbosity returned by annotations, now allows for return of annotations in the Use field, and has improved design in user interface and dialog boxes.

For downloads and further information on the latest version and the development & use of the tool visit: PBCore Instantiationizer 1.2 (https://www.avpreserve.com/pbcore-instantiationizer/)
or
PBCore Instantiationizing — Information and Guidance on Use (https://www.avpreserve.com/pbcore-instantiationizer/pbcore-instantiationizing/)

Adding Another Dimension

After reading both Roger Ebert’s and A. O. Scott’s recent pronouncements on 3-D in film, I realized it was finally time for me to make a statement to settle the issue (“Why I Hate 3-D (and You Should Too)” & “Adding a Dimension to the Frenzy“). A caveat on my bona fides here — excluding Jaws 3-D on VHS (with someone sitting next to me who had seen it in the theatre pointing out all of the awesome points that were in 3-D), the only 3-D viewing experiences I have had have been Captain EO and Beowulf. The former I don’t really remember because I was an annoying rebellious teen on a long family vacation at the time, which meant I was too busy with teenaged self-focus to pay all that much attention. All I really remember is Disneyland being closed due to rain (only the second or third time ever), getting ohsoclose to the Psycho house, and practicing my tuba in the back of the family Suburban parked on a San Francisco side street. Like I said.

The latter I try not to remember because it was not my viewing choice, but also because the poem Beowulf is a personal favorite. I’m not a stickler for strictness in adaptations, but for some reason I take a principled stance that something like Beowulf or other medieval texts gain very little (and lose much) from the insertion of more modern concepts of character, plot, and motivation. Never mind the image — the stories themselves work much better as 2-D, flat narrative.

But that’s enough dimensions laid out to show my obvious expertise on the subject; back to critics who think decades of training and practice actually mean something. When I read Ebert’s essay in Newsweek when it came out, I found much to agree with. Like my assessment of Beowulf several of his arguments point to the feeling that 3-D does not add anything to character or storytelling that is not already in the script, that 2-D artistry does not cover, or that our imagination does not already account for. Scott concedes these points to a degree, but offers the counterpoints that we may all be surprised by the ultimate artistry of 3-D once/if it reaches a mature state, and that what it currently has the potential to add is the magic of the cinema viewing experience. When done well, it is able to compliment our imagination and take us out of our seat and into the world of the film. This is, of course, something traditional film can do, but 3-D is able to do it in a new way, which makes it all terribly exciting and profit generating in the here and now.

All of this fretting over the significance, quality, and fortitude of 3-D is, as Scott suggests, just a lot of noise that won’t be sorted out until further down the road. The format may be a blip on the screen, or it may be the next revolution in moving images, but there is no way to know right now and no commentator has the correct answer. New will become old and will become fodder for reassessment.

However, from a different angle, “a new way” is of great concern here. Standards and best practices for preserving (especially video and digital) moving image materials are still being hashed out for the old way. How, then, should we (or do we really need to) account for 3-D? Is it an outlier or do we need to scrap everything and establish systems and workflows that mainly accommodate 3-D? Many organizations are discussing their system and infrastructure needs for storing and managing their digital video assets. They are well aware of the jump in hardware and software requirements from SD to HD, but now lately it has become apparent that they will have to start considering the requirements for handling HD 3-D because there could likely be someone in the organization that would want to use the format. This is why, in the archivist’s case, the persistence of 3-D’s application matters. Would an organization’s management of assets have to center around tools that are powerful enough to handle HD 3-D (tools that may not yet exist in reliable forms), or would they be able to plan for a less intensive system with some work-arounds for the dribs and drabs of 3-D? The more cost effect solution for today may be the right choice, or it may end up being much more costly in the future when the system has to be rebuilt.

As in the consideration of the cultural impact of 3-D, there is no easy answer immediately at hand. The difference is, cultural relevance can be left up to history to interpret; the preservation of these materials should not and cannot be left to some undetermined point in the future to handle. There are a number of difficult (and at times expensive) technical and ethical decisions that need to be made when preserving our audiovisual heritage, but decisions delayed will create more difficult (and certainly more expensive) circumstances to overcome.

The decisions are difficult because they are important because the materials matter. But I feel we archivists will have no trouble overcoming them. You see, we actually view the world in 4-D (usually taught in the 2nd semester of most archiving programs). We have to look ahead in time to envision the future access and use (or potential decay) of audiovisual materials, and, really, 3-D is a childish medium compared to that.

— Joshua Ranger

Embedded Metadata In WAVE Files: A Look Inside Issues And Tools

Embedded metadata is a key component of managing digital files, providing information on the correct presentation, file source, rights, and other information which supports findability, access, authentication, preservation, and more.

This paper discusses the concept and uses of embedded metadata in general, and then looks more specifically at its use in WAVE audio files, focusing on the efforts of the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative (FADGI) to develop recommendations on embedding metadata in audio files created by government agencies. This project resulted in the development of BWF MetaEdit, a tool which allows users to view, edit, and create embedded metadata in WAVE files.

• EMBEDDED METADATA (PDF)

All Well And Good

One of the topics that led me to a career in archiving — perhaps out of fascination or perhaps out of dread — is the speed at which a culture can begin to view a pattern or idea as a set-in-stone, age-old tradition. The presidential pardon of a Thanksgiving turkey is spoken and thought of as if it were instituted along with Article II of the Constitution, but it was actually first performed by George H W Bush in 1989. The historical record preserved in archives informs us of What-Was, but, of equal importance, it reminds us that What-Is Wasn’t-Always.

Of course, though this area is of great concern to me, that does not mean I am immune to it, as I was reminded by a New York Times Magazine On Language column a couple of weeks ago (“Wellness”, April 12, 2010). I had had no idea that the term ‘wellness’ was relatively new and had been relatively controversial in its application. I had grown up with the word, and had even taken the required Wellness class in high school, a course that combined Health and P.E. I didn’t think much of it at the time — just another core requirement taught by one of the cadre of football coaches to suffer through — but in hindsight there was plenty of packaging going on. Chapter 1 in the textbook was a long form definition of wellness, and the class was continually sold as a great advance in teaching innovation (MWF we’re going to watch filmstrips about health and hygiene, TuTh we’re going to play ping pong or go bowling or something.).

All that Wellness, and yet still I was not immune to a short-sighted view of culture.

Lucky for me (and for you) I spotted a more interesting trail splitting off from Memory Lane. I’m still hacking my way through some of the undergrowth, but I began to consider archives as part of the health-wellness continuum of institutions. There are a number of factors that are considered to point to the health of an organization or industry. Finances, leadership, business models, investments, future prospects — all of the things that are included in Quarterly or Annual Reports to show that things are good and going to get better.

As the Blue Ribbon Task Force report on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access has made clear, there need to be new lines of argument developed to convince stakeholders and decision-makers that investment in preservation is worthwhile. Perhaps one of these new lines is how archives contribute to and reflect on the overall health, the wellness, of an organization. The maintenance of an institutional past through a preserved, accessible archive establishes a source of materials that can contribute to the achievement of an organization’s goals and missions while also developing a respect for the past and long-held traditions that can contribute to organizational pride, employee well-being, and guidance for the future.

There’s a general idea, on-the-ground as it were, that how one treats one’s family, friends, and material goods in one’s private life is a reflection on how that person might interact with or treat others in the public realm. Depending on how much you agree with the Supreme Court’s definition of corporate personhood, this might be a leap here, but perhaps, too, we could say that how an organization treats their archive and history might be interpreted by employees, investors, and the general public as a reflection of how the institution would deal with them. A high level of care and respect for institutional character and past may translate into a view of that organization’s high level of care for people and for producing high quality work. This may not be of direct monetary economic benefit, but it is certainly of social economic benefit that can contribute to the furthering of an organization’s goals.

These are just the rough beginnings of some ideas here. What’s more certain is that we may have gone to the well one too many times with unfocused arguments on why archives are important and preservation should be funded. Nobody would really disagree with that statement, but it doesn’t mean they would take actions to support it. Creating the prompts or incentives for following through with support and funding is where we need to do some focused cross-training in order to start help moving archives — and the culture — further up the wellness continuum.

— Joshua Ranger