Article

Benign Neglect Is Not A Preservation Strategy

I rarely rewatch movies or reread books. My urge when given a choice is to opt for something new to me. I know some would say I’m missing out on uncovering new layers or new understandings of a “text”, but I suppose any anxiety coming out of the thought that I many suddenly be cornered into a conversation about the referential hermeneutics of De Palma’s mid-career oeuvre is lesser than the anxiety over the fact that there’s a whole mess of stuff out there to wade through in a limited amount of time.

Another anxiety I have is that upon rereading/rewatching something, I just won’t feel the same passion or interest as I did the first time. The humor won’t tickle as much, the thrills won’t be as knuckle bleaching, and the drama will be more mellow than Melo-. Not only would it sadden me to piddle away two hours on lukewarm enjoyment, but it would also sadden me to have my pleasant memories decayed much more quickly than is already happening by the ravages of time and whiskey.

It sounds silly, but I don’t think it’s that odd of a fear. It certainly has happened to me (and I assume others) before. At one level I’ve often read film critics talk about reassessing a film outside of the initial context/emotion of a film festival setting. On a personal level I’ve made a number of attempts to revisit works I passionately adored in high school and have been left rather flat. That being the case one has to recognize that tastes shift with age and awareness, and adolescence, with its high emotions, bitter dislike of hypocrisy, and obsession with defining the self, is well fed by the Orwells, the Rands, and the Thoreaus with their stark, unyielding philosophies and allegories of struggling against the masses.

You have to figure that teachers love having Orwell, Rand, et al at hand because their styles do appeal to students, but also because the literary starkness does lend itself to use (and instruction) of tropes in a way that sticks up out of the ground for readers to trip over: Allegory, irony, paradox, hyperbole, satire, oxymoron…

Oxymoron. That was our favorite. One, it sounded funny. Two, it was great nerd humor (Pretty ugly. Bwaa haa haa! Business ethics. Bwaa haa haa! Military intelligence. Bwaa haa haa!). Three, it was a tool for us to see through what the Man was pushing through His linguistic flim flam.

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Ah, youth! More fleeting than magnetic media yet, at times, as deeply ingrained as grooved media, fluttering through time in brief moments of beauty beween the pops and cracks of age. Yet still, amidst the melancholy, my own youthful fist shakes in the air again (unless that’s my Old Man fist shaking at the kids to get off my lawn).

And what burr is under my saddle this time? The great oxymoron of our field, the concept of benign neglect that has been tolerated as something…benign…for too long. Considered favorable, even.

I wonder, how did this idea become accepted practice? My natural disposition toward the expectation of human failure chalks it up to a redefinition of a lucky coincidence. This film was left for an extended period with no archival type care :: The condition is fine :: We can keep doing this as a matter of policy. My paradoxical (aha!) other natural disposition toward empathy understands the resource challenges involved in managing collections and overcoming backlogs. We have to find the level of what is enough to do to properly care for collections in a way that can be efficiently applied across the most assets. I suppose benign neglect fits here perfectly because it can be done all at once to an entire collection no matter the size.

But no. I refuse to believe this is a viable preservation strategy. I refuse to believe that funneling collection management decisions through the expectation of failure (I will not be able to do anything about this so I will not) is an acceptable option. To be a strategy there must be some definition of process and application. Which formats and format qualities does it apply or not apply to? How long of a term should it be applied before items are reviewed for condition? At what point in an assets lifecycle can it reasonably be applied or when is it too late? How do you underscore the “in correct conditions” caveat? And how do you stop the ideology to creeping into areas where it should not be used, where it could be harmful, or where action cannot be put off anymore?

The fact of the matter is that declaring an ideal preservation format must support benign neglect as a strategy subsumes the fact that millions of assets exist already for which such an approach is not possible or that need to be reformatted now.

Failure happens.

Things go a way.

Things are lost.

From my point of view, benign neglect sees these facts and adopts a plan for giving up before starting, rather than giving it a best effort despite the certainty that those efforts will fall short. Neglect is not benign because it is a choice one makes not to act, not just something that happens. The only time neglect is benign is when one refuses to answer phone calls from telemarketers.

Bwaa haa haa!!

— Joshua Ranger

AVPS At Createasphere Digital Asset Management Conference

The AVPS team is excited to be participating in the 2012 Createasphere Digital Asset Management Conference in New York City as both a presenter and an exhibitor. Createasphere provides training, conferences, networking, and other resources regarding the use of technology in the creation and management of media assets. Their regional DAM conferences present real world use cases from end users and experts in the field to discuss the challenges and solutions to managing digital collections.

On the presentation side, Senior Consultant Kara Van Malssen will be chairing the panel What Do You Mean I Need Digital Preservation? I’ve got DAM with presenters Sally Hubbard of HBO and Karen Cariani of WGBH. The panel will discuss the areas where DAMS fulfill the needs of digital preservation and where the systems require supplemental tools and strategies, with input from how these issues are being approached by two of the country’s largest broadcast entities.

You can also catch Kara and the rest of the AVPS team at booth 308 in the Exhibitor Hall. Come chat about your media preservation and collection management needs and pick up some of our popular archiving themed buttons. Createasphere takes place this Thursday and Friday, September 27-28 at the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan. See you there!

Using Open Source And Free Tools For AV Digital Preservation Workflows

Archiving and preservation consist of technology, people, and policies. For technology in particular, digital AV archives are largely indebted and beholden to a few sizable industries: cinema, broadcast, and information technology.

Commercial interests catering to the aforementioned industries have produced a seemingly attractive tool set that has the potential to provide archives with the ability to apply their policies in service of preservation-oriented workflows. Yet, even in the hands of larger well-resourced organizations, employing these tools can be challenging and resource intensive. How can smaller, resource-constrained AV archives efficiently apply cost effective tools and technologies to their workflows?

This article by Kara Van Malssen was originally published in AV Insider, Issue 2, September 2012.

• TOOLS FOR SMALLER BUDGETS (PDF)

Preservation Is Not A Format

An aphoristic interpretation in 10 parts

1. Authorial intent is, for all practical purposes, bunk. It presupposes, fallaciously, either the existence of the singular creator, or the total achievability of an artistic vision.

The former is false because it is a figment of the artist’s imagination. The latter, because it is a figment of the consumer’s imagination.

 

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2. The desired qualities of a format and the availability of a format do not necessarily converge. The adoption of a format for creative uses may be a matter of convenience rather than vision and integrity.

 

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3. Despite the philosophical crutch that Benjamin represents, the problem of reproducable media did not begin with photography. The printing press blew apart the conceptual framework and reliance on hand-copied manuscripts. This resulted in massive increases in literacy, the Protestant Reformation, and American democracy.

Agitation prompted by reproducable media of the 20th century has resulted in The People vs. George Lucas and discussion forum debates over the presentation of Friends in HD.

 

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4. A primary pleasure of the cinema experience — sitting in the dark, the engulfing screen — is that it distracts from the worn, frequently unhygienic setting. The odors are another matter.

Multiplexes compound these issues.

 

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5.

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6. “As it was meant to be seen” is a remnant of the VHS homevideo age, referring merely to the use of the correct aspect ratio, not to format or presentation method. Extrapolation to other aspects of media consumption in an age of non-homogenous platforms is limited at best, tedious at worst.

 

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7. Suggested Library of Congress Subject Heading: Defining parameters of technological purity, Randomness of

 

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8. Planned obsolescence is used as a pejorative when conducted by corporations, as a sign of artistic purity when utilized by creators. Both inhibit future access.

 

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9. Aesthetic valuation is a result of temporal, cultural, and personal interpretation, both at the moment of creation and the moment of consumption. These interpretive moments impact continued future interpretation factatorily.

 

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10. Were we not culturally tied to a base 10 system, 10 aphorisms would still be an arbitrary selection.

 

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— Joshua Ranger

The Present Analog Dark Age

The great thing about predicting doom and gloom is that the end times are always imminent, but never quite here. The natural state of a threat is to loom. If it actually ever happens — hey, you’re prescient! If not, well, there’s still the possibility…

The death of film has been a productive area for prognosticators on both sides of the fence, those lamenting its passing as a Caligulan descent into a cultural morass and those cheering its decease as an evolutionary improvement on par with a whole planetary society of apes, damned and/or dirty though they may be.

Kodak’s recent foray into a market previously deemed too small to be feasible notwithstanding, the death of film has — denying both sides of another fence on the property — been neither greatly exaggerated nor correctly reported. Though we are all legally compelled to consider corporations as people, the death of a non-human entity is not a singular temporal or irreversible event.

Another profitable area where people are encroaching on Nostradamus’ turf is the gnashing of teeth and tolling of bells declaring the coming digital dark age, the period when all digital content will be lost and, because all analog content will have been trashed after it is digitized and posted on the Facebook, all human knowledge will disappear or be locked up in the secular, Internets version of monasteries (i.e., third-party owned server farms) — well, there or, once again, saved in the mouths of the Irish, gar bless ’em — as occurred in the original Dark Ages.

Later arguments aside, are we really in such an intellectual…dark age where we can’t even imagine new historical structures/events without them simply mirroring or borrowing from past epochs we read a paragraph about in Western Civ?

I will here bite my tongue (whilst still I bite my thumb) about an essential misrepresentation of the richness of the medieval period that the pejorative of the Dark Ages (and its Euro-centrism) has bequeathed upon the era, a timespan which itself, like the death of film, has no hard temporal definition.

Rather, I would say, or will say presently, we should set the idea of the coming digital dark ages aside for a moment. Set aside the fear of the future and understand that we are already in the midst of an analog media dark age right… … … now. Formats are obsolete. Archives and individuals do not know what content they have and in many cases do not have the means to access it. Much of our audiovisual heritage is at risk of being lost, but a large portion of that is already effectively lost because it is unfindable and/or inaccessible. Though an item is still physically sitting there on a shelf or in a box and has not burnt up in an Alexandrian fire, that does not mean the content is doing or is able to do its cultural/institutional work.

And really, this is the same state of digital media today as well. Countless files are essentially lost due to lack of findability and usability. The risk of loss is not inherent in the digital/analog divide but is a result of the exponential growth of content creation, material or structural factors of created objects, and the lack of broad resource support for the institutions tasked with preserving our cultural heritage. These factors, and the fear-mongering over the digital dark ages or the loss of even one single object, contribute to an atmosphere of inaction and indecision, one where the horror of future failure obscures the reality of the present and the pathways to managing that reality — pathways we as professionals have the skills to imagine, define, and follow.

— Joshua Ranger

What’s Your Product? New AVPS White Paper On MPLP And Audiovisual Collections

I’ve been nibbling around the edges of this topic for a while — and reviewing my thoughts with other people to see if they all taste the hints of vanilla, cassis, leather, and grass — but now I’ve gone off and written a white paper about More Product, Less Process and audiovisual collections: What’s Your Product? Assessing the suitability of a More Product, Less Process methodology for processing audiovisual collections.

It ain’t exactly the great American novel, unless, of course, you feel that fiction is all lies and drives people away from reality and into their hysterical fantasy worlds. Then I’d say you’d really enjoy this paper. Even if you are one of the 27 people supporting the publishing industry these days, I hope you’ll find something worthwhile to think about or argue with me about in the comments below or directly.

— Joshua (M.) Ranger

Abstract:
The widely referenced and adopted More Product, Less Process methodology (MPLP) represents a much needed evolution in the manner of processing archival collections in order to overcome backlogs and resource shortfalls that institutions face. In the case of audiovisual-based collections, however, the ability to plan budgets, timelines, equipment needs, and other preservation plans that unequivocally impact access is directly tied to the documentation of some degree of item-level knowledge about one’s collection. This paper proposes an extension of the MPLP model which is necessitated to properly address the particular needs of audiovisual and other complex media in a way that properly meets archival standards and that assists the archivist in generating their true product: the provision of the three basic services of Findability, Access, and Sustainability regardless of the format, the content, or the tools used.

• Link to the PDF in English
• Link to the PDF in Spanish

What Makes A Collection Unhidden?

It’s very easy to make a collection hidden. Much too easy. If you can ingest a collection, you can hide it. In fact, that’s probably what you do. We don’t even have to delve into backlogs (I mean yes, we must, but here, conceptually, we needn’t just now); being hidden is the default status of an acquisition.

This fact (okay, and the backlogs) is just one reason why the CLIR-funded Hidden Collections projects and similar efforts are so very important. An archive starts in the hole. It helps for someone to toss down a flare and a ham sandwich every so often. Or cheese. Or hummus on a gluten-free wrap.

Because I’ve been thinking about processing audiovisual collections a lot lately, and because I have nothing better to do with my time besides deconstruct the meaning of single words (though I do also enjoy decoupage and carving stamps out of potatoes) I’ve been contemplating just what it is that makes a collection unhidden.

Essentially, I would say that an unhidden collection is one that is able to be discovered and subsequently accessed by users, preferably in a way that decreases the mediation of the archivist. Discovery means the creation of some record of the material that can be searched or browsed, whether a finding aid, publicly accessible catalog, or other mechanism. Access means the ability to call up the material (or facsimile thereof) in person or (if available) online, and, for lack of single encapsulating sensory term, consume it (i.e., read, listen, watch, smell, etc.)

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In 9th grade I began collecting pennies in the lefthand pocket of my Green Bay Packers Starters jacket. By 10th grade I had several dollars worth that I lugged around with me everywhere, always very careful about how I removed my jacket and how I hung it or set it down. It seemed worth it for the one or two times someone was short a few cents and I could “humorously” pull out a handful of pennies to help. It was really worth it the one time I needed 50 cents to get a Dr. Pepper from a vending machine and had to trade someone for quarters. Harpo Marxx aspirations aside, there was a cost and a weight to carrying these un-utilized assets.

— — — — — —

This all makes sense.

Well, not the pennies.

Except.

Except.

Except that not all materials in archives can be accessed — in person, online, or otherwise. I’m not just talking condition here, but the fact that a large portion of audiovisual materials are entirely inaccessible simply because there is no means of playback within the institution.

This, of course, impedes that idea of access. Frequently, due to the lack of annotations or other knowledge of the content, it even impedes the creation of a descriptive record that would enable potential access. In other words, the creation of a record for unknown audiovisual content promotes neither direct discovery nor access. The collection remains hidden until both aspects are fulfilled, which means that in many cases reformatting is a precursor to description as a precursor to becoming Unhidden.

(I really wish that the word were something stronger like Unbound, but unhound sounds like getting rid of a dog, and I don’t want to let go of my guy:)

In order to unhide audiovisual collections they need to be transferred to a state where they can be described and accessed. This means that the initial pass of unhiding needs to gather data that supports planning for reformatting or other means of access, after which descriptive documentation can take place if it does not exist already and the content can be consumed upon request. Without a technical reckoning of the collection, realistic planning for budgeting, staffing, workflows, and timelines cannot take place. You can get a penny for your thoughts, but not for shelves full of unknown, inaccessible assets.

— Joshua Ranger

AVPS Attending SAA 2012

AudioVisual Preservation Solutions President Chris Lacinak and Senior Consultant Joshua Ranger will be at the upcoming Society of American Archivists conference in San Diego. This will be the first year that AVPS will have a booth in the Expo hall. While we’ll try to take in as many sessions as possible to keep up on trends and developments in the field, we’re very excited to support SAA as well as for the opportunity to meet colleagues and discuss media preservation. Plus, we’ll have AVPS buttons, so stop by Booth 315 and see us!

How Necessary Is Rehousing Archival Audio & Video?

When I was first out of school I interviewed for a project archivist position with a long-standing acting school in New York. The interview was with the director of the school who, to understate it, was somewhat dramatic, and the whole thing felt more like an audition than an interview. It even started off with what seemed like an improv exercise. As soon as I sat down the director said, “Okay. You’re given a box of archival materials. It’s a mix of papers, tapes, maybe some books or photos. What do you do? Go.”

Being a freshly minted archivist I of course was cautious, describing how I would assess the contents and their arrangement in the box, and then deliberately and carefully remove them to begin identification and plan my approach.

At some point the director began waving her arm in the air, saying, “Stop stop stop. Why does everyone always say the same thing?!”

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I didn’t get that job — very likely because I asked for a living wage — but I have frequently thought of that interview experience, wondering why that response would bother a non-archivist so much, but also wondering exactly why I said the same thing as everyone else.

The simple answer there is, of course, the result of my training in the standards and traditions of archiving. Not having a lot of practical experience at that point I hadn’t yet been confronted with the real world application of those standards beyond the idealism encased in ivied walls.

To be sure, standards and methodologies are necessary as reference points, but as with cooking, true skill comes in understanding not just the What, but the Why and How. It is the difference between being able to follow a recipe and being able to cook.

One area I’ve been looking into the Why is rehousing. I know MPLP-style processing has tried to limit this for paper materials from a workflow point of view, but the love for non-acidic and polypropelene enclosures is hard to break. Especially if they’re very small or custom made.

I understand the need for rehousing at the item/folder/box level for paper, photographs, and film materials. First, it helps store things on limited shelf space to have some regularity in their form and arrangement and can also provide some form of intellectual arrangement to aid discovery. Second, for things that last a long time, storing them in a way that promotes that extended longevity makes sense. If you can make a film last 100 years instead of 30, why not invest in that?

But audiotape and videotape present a number of issues here. Primary is the basic availability of materials. Archival (inert polypropylene) containers really only exist for VHS, audiocassettes, and 1/4″ open reel — essentially the widely adopted commercial formats that have existed in large quantities in lending libraries (beyond just archives). Without that use case, those containers would have likely never been produced in large quantities. The lack of options means that the most at risk tape formats (and those that will be at high risk in 10-20 years) do not have an option for rehousing for long term storage.

But is this actually a problem?

Planning for long term storage of 2″ Quad or 3/4″ U-matic may not be that worthwhile of an exercise. Many tape formats are at the point condition- or obsolesence-wise where near term reformatting is really the only option for preservation. A 1/2″ open reel videotape will not appreciatively gain from being placed in a new container.

This begs the question, then, of what the benefit is of rehousing audiocassettes, VHS, and 1/4″ open reel tape. Reformatting is an unavoidable activity. Is anything gained in the cost expenditure of equipment –> rehousing –> processing –> reformatting versus just reformatting? Physically speaking, does 3 years in polypropylene significantly counteract 45 years in acidic cardboard or vinyl? Is it worth it to spend $10,000 on plastic case rather than on reformatting or on playback equipment? Any practical experience or opinions on this issue out there?

— Joshua Ranger

5 Tips For What Not To Do When Creating A File Naming Structure

The human desire to classify and name is a highly personal and a greatly prized act. Naming the files we create is no different, though the number of files and tools used for managing them place a great need on consistent structure and application of file naming guidelines. What to do is then very simple – consistency. More to the point is what not to do in order to avoid pitfalls.

• 5 TIPS FOR FILE NAMING (PDF)

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