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2011 Archives Year In Review

When the world ends next December, all of our blathering and fretting over the best way to preserve archival materials will prove to have been in vain. In spite of it all, we trundle ahead with our work like the Sisyphean hero. Normally, I imagine the hill decades or centuries long; if asked my opinion about a new movie or album or current event, I say ask me again in 50 years. But, considering the circumstances, the normal timeline needs accelerating. Thus, the 2011 Archives Year in Review.

Most Interesting Acquisition: Library of Congress to receive entire Twitter archive
Though easily mocked by Your Dad (Yes, Twitter is mostly banal content, but so are the journals and letters of the past that are considered important source materials today) this acquisition is important not only because of the snapshot it provides of everyday life and the way that technology affects or is adapted by society, but also because of the technological efforts required to ingest and preserve the collection. As LOC Digital Initiatives Program Manager Bill Lefurgy says in the article, the Library needs to develop guidelines and methodologies for how to accept and manage very large data sets in anticipation of future acquisitions. The Twitter data presents an excellent opportunity to collaborate with private industry on improved means for data transfer and preservation.

Most Appropriate Reaction to the Twitter Acquisition: Tweeted by @AlbertBrooks, “Damn. If I had known this I never would’ve done that one about my ass”

Most Archivally Philosophical Documentary: Knuckle
The argument over the best use of archival material in a documentary is a parlor game, no real answer but a playful way to show off one’s erudition and argue for argument’s sake. Instead I ask the question, when does source material become archival material? Ian Palmer’s Knuckle, a documentary about the tradition of bare-knuckle fighting to settle disputes among families in the Irish Traveller community, was videotaped periodically over 12 years before being crafted into a film. Palmer states that he put the tapes away in boxes and didn’t even know what the content was until reviewing it when production started. What defines an archive? Age? The way it’s stored? Frequency of access? Original intention for the materials? An original creator vs. a re-user of existing material?

Most Egregious Use of Archival Material in a Documentary: Flying Monsters 3D with David Attenborough
The 3D processes used in this film did not exist during the dinosaur age, so I can only assume that they used some crappy post-process conversion on the source footage. Very disappointing.

#waytotakeastand Award for Archives: Association for Recorded Sound Collections Copyright Committee
Many people don’t realize that audio recordings made prior to 1972 fall under state and not federal copyright law. This means that the same length of copyright, public domain applications, and Section 108 protections do not apply to audio recordings unless a state has modified its laws to mirror federal statutes. This is seldom the case, and as a result the access to pre-1923 works and the ability of libraries and archives to take care of such works has been severely limited. Since 2009, ARSC has been rattling cages in the federal government to prompt a change to this odd exemption, and the US Copyright Office will be releasing a report studying the issue in the near future. Way to take a stand!

#yourenothelping Award for Archives: Digital Photo Frames
I know all the HGH we’re taking is giving us enormous heads and wide bodies, but imagine those heads stretched from 4:3 to a 16:9 aspect ratio. We don’t have to worry about preserving digital photography because our great-great-grandchildren will be so freaked out by the monstrosities they see that they will destroy them all anyway. The insidious infiltration of devices like these (and widescreen televisions) present a major need area for media education.

Archive of the Year: That Box of Photos Under My Bed
It’s got some really great stuff in it. I swear I’ll get around to taking care of it in 2012.

Happy New Year!

Don’t Kill The Carrier Part 1 — The Digital Dilemma Is A Communication Problem Not A Format Problem

My first experience with 16mm home projection was during a sleepover at a classmate’s home. I was 7 and at the time in a private school in southern Oregon, which meant my classmate A) either lived in town or in an even smaller town somewhere within a 50 mile radius (it was the latter), and B) that his parents were either overly strict, religious, or anti-authoritarian (it was primarily the latter). For those of you not from the West Coast, this type of anti-authoritarianism tends to manifest on a broad continuum, with the peacelovehippies on one end, the Manson hippies on the other, and bulk represented in the middle by more of a Bakersfield/Five Easy Pieces kind of vibe.

Of course segments of these types mix together in contradictory ways. At my classmate’s house we were forbidden from watching Three’s Company because it was too racy, we went to a natural food store for snacks made from various puffed or toasted grains (after sneaking some Nerds and Bottle Caps on our way from the bus to his home), and we spent the evening watching 16mm educational films because his father worked for a distributor and could get a projector and films for free.

So my associative experience with 16mm film projection? Some combination of awe over moon landings, malnourishment (70s health food was a much different [soy-based] beast than what is available today), and primarily discomfort and slight concerns over my safety in case I made a reference to Loni Anderson or Soap. In my mind, viewing a film film in a non-theatrical venue equates to nervousness, low level fear, and hunger.

What, then, does this mean in terms of the format? Nothing, really. 16mm is not inherently Manson-like (8mm, perhaps), but these are my emotional attachments to the viewing experience. This is nothing against the format or the filmic experience — my next 16mm viewing came 20 some odd years later on a Brooklyn rooftop, discussing the deep magenta tone of a NYPL print of On The Town in between reel changes with my NYU archiving cohorts. There was probably a similar degree of fear and hunger involved, but, overall, a rather different experience than the earlier one.

Between these endpoints, my primary interactions with Cinema were the multiplex, television, home video, and TV/VCR combos rolled into classrooms. My film classes at two universities before NYU utilized projected VHS tapes, either from the library, Blockbuster, or dubbed from TV. Despite my chosen career and the obvious aesthetic qualities of film, my life and the lives of the bulk of people I know have to make me assume that over the past 30 years these types of experiences with movies are more representative of the broader culture than actual film projection.

And it is exactly these points of personal experience and aestheticism where the film-as-film preservation argument runs into the first of many impediments — not due to a question of quality but a question of how we communicate across a broad audience. We can write touching paeans about our personal attachment to film or create masterful homages to certain styles or periods in cinematic history, but in the end we have to consider whether these great enlightenment sermons are converting souls or just creating an emotional buzz for ourselves, whether they push ideas ahead or are more like resigned obituaries looking to reify the past ere it dissipates forever.

We also have to consider that media archiving and preservation extend well beyond motion picture film. Within the past 20-30 years how much content has been created on video as opposed to film? And what of audio? These media types do not have a viable long term format to migrate to outside of the digital realm, and many of them are already born digital. Perhaps we need to ask ourselves if a fundamental rejection of digital preservation and the work needed to establish archival methodologies in favor of film is ultimately detrimental to the preservation needs of non-film materials as well as the presentation needs of existing digital cinema.

The personal narrative can be an effective rhetorical angle, but it is not the entire argument. In order to more successfully advocate for the importance of media archiving and preservation we need to acknowledge that the unreceptive do not typically travel the Damascan road. Within the humanities, critical arguments based on the appreciation of all that is sweetness and light are valid but limited lines of reasoning. Limited because aesthetic arguments tend to be easily dismissed by those not of like mind or similar background as mere opinion or too soft, but also limited because it does not take full advantage of the skills a humanities education provides: analysis, questioning, interpretation, empathy, awareness of audience, historical perspective, and more.

As with all formats, the risks associated with digital media and its material differences from film are real and definable. The way those risks and differences are communicated — both in terms of creating awareness and establishing means of dealing with them — will greatly affect our ability to deal with the challenges and to gather the resources we need to do so.

Next: Don’t Kill the Carrier Part the Second: The Digital Dilemma is a Resource Problem not a Format Problem

— Joshua Ranger

Why I Won’t Be Using The Word Archive Anymore

A segment on a recent episode of Radiolab discussed the work of experimental music composer William Basinski. As one line of exploration in the past, Basinski took classical or Muzak-type recordings, dubbed short sections of them and applied various distortions such as adjusting tape speed, and then made short audiotape recordings from the results. He then housed this tape in continuous loop cassette shells, such as one may find in museum displays. Played out over even just a few minutes, these snippets take on the depth and texture of a longer, more complex composition.

Interesting in itself, the story within this story is actually about how when, several years ago, Basinski was “archiving” these works (his word for what consisted of playing the tapes out to CD until it reached capacity while he made some tea) the oxide on some tapes began to flake off during playback. Instead of stopping the tapes, he let them continue to play until, gradually, all of the binder was gone. The audio captured is a haunting fragmentation and lurching decay of the audio signal which he fashioned into a series of works entitled The Disintegration Loops.

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“Everything and Nothing” from WNYC’s Radiolab

While I have to admit that these works are quite moving, I also have to admit that the way Basinski used the term archiving to describe what he was doing also moved something within me to snap. This seemed to be the point at which some dawning realizations gelled, at which a nagging thought in the back of my head became a lens projecting truth onto the screen of my mind. Archive is a word that should be archived. Archive is a word that is dead.

You see, I believe that words have a weight to them, a density that increases and decreases across time. They become muscular through regular exercising, atrophied through disuse, chipped away at by re-appropriation, or grow slow and heavy with the burden of associations, their definition becoming amorphous and diffuse. In this way words become tools or cudgels or shackles, acting for us or upon us on the metaphysical and perceptual planes as such instruments would on the physical. In my view, archive and the words derived from it have been co-opted and negatively connotated, stripped of definite meaning and weighted with preconceptions.

I often run into the feeling out there from those outside the field that archives are inaccessible holes, deep in the recesses of an institution, the place where one dumps stuff one cannot stomach to discard but cannot really see a future use for…though even in such cases it may be preferable to stash those items away in a desk drawer one seldom opens and is not exactly sure of the contents, just because it’s such a pain to request assets back from the archivist. And the archivists, the guardians of these dungeons, are the Grendels of an institution — uncompromising hoarders of treasures, made grumpy by the joyous, uncaring excesses of man, preferring exile and avoidance of daylight.

But flip the coin, and archives become deep cisterns of knowledge and reusable content where an individual can discover their ancestry, remix a video, or learn about the fascinating history of People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive Award. It is also where an organization can develop new content out of old, push a retro or ‘classic’ marketing campaign, feed materials to the Web or social media, or derive a new product from old R&D.

Flip the coin again, however, and an archive is a portal to access digital surrogates — either public à la something like the Internet Archive or private (as in Kenneth Goldsmith’s wrong-headed claims) like one’s personal iTunes library. In this sense archive seems to just be used to refer to a collection of things that exist and are arranged together. These models may have an actual collection policy and preservation-oriented archive behind the scenes, or it may be based off of derivatives embedded or linked from other sources that may disappear at any time, or it may be an asset management and access utility pulling from one’s harddrive.

Flip the coin yet again and archive becomes a verb, some vaguely defined act that has been used to mean moving a file to a different folder on a server, sticking an item on a shelf or in a drawer to be accessed sometime…maybe, digitizing a work and putting it on DVD or online, or, in general, just letting someone else worry about the dang thing. Used in its lay or commercial sense, archiving something has less to do with quality and fidelity to originals than with removing clutter or establishing access via preferred platforms.

One may be impressed at this cornucopia of meaning, or proud at the sheer number of columns ‘archive’ would take up in the Oxford English Dictionary (Would we call that an archive of language?). However, my concern here is that this coin has too many sides, too many opposing facets, and that makes it invalid currency. The weighted or confused definitions mean that the ideas we attempt to communicate around discussing the work and importance of archives are often misinterpreted or unaccepted, their value lost in the exchange rate or enforced duty.

An archive can take on many forms and many roles that are not necessarily compatible or recognizable as the same thing from organization to organization. Similarly so, archiving is a broad collection of actions applied in degrees as a given situation demands or allows. I started off by saying I would not use the word archive anymore, but, really, there is a choice here about whether to cut and run or to dig in and work to better define and communicate the issues. It seems like an insurmountable challenge, but then again, I hear that archives are full of the stories of people making a difference.

— Joshua Ranger

AVPS In Austin For AMIA 2011

AudioVisual Preservation Solutions is proud to be a sponsor and participant of the 2011 Association of Moving Image Archivists Annual Conference taking place in Austin, Texas November 16th-19th. AVPS President Chris Lacinak will chair the session “Developing a Media Preservation Program at Indiana University Bloomington” with Speaker Mike Casey (IU). Following from the Sound Directions and FACET projects, Indiana University has been planning a campus wide media digitization project, a groundbreaking program in media preservation that AVPS has had the privilege to contribute to.

Before the conference proper begins, AVPS Senior Consultant Kara Van Malssen will be one of the instructors for the day-long PBCore Cataloging Workshop, and later in the week she will Co-Chair both the panel “Archive and the Commons: Why Archives Should Embrace Openness” and the International Outreach Committee meeting. Kara has been a strong advocate for education, international collaboration, and technological innovation in archives; she and her co-panelists look to present some highly informational and entertaining sessions.

Look us up if you’re in Austin for the conference, and keep an eye out for Senior Consultant Joshua Ranger who will be toting around the Official AVPS Audio Reader for some magnetic media fun. We’re looking forward to another great conference, seeing all of our friends and colleagues, and spending time in one of the great American cities.

Digital Media Collections Are An IT Problem But Not An IT Solution

The power and the flexibility of content use and distribution in the digital realm is enabled by the ability to break everything down into the same essential components, into the 1’s and 0’s that form the atomic structure of data. In its idealized form, that content and the persistent structural wholeness of digital files do not matter in the same way they do with analog materials. One would not tear pages out of a book to ship it separately in smaller envelopes, nor would one store half-second fragments of a film on separate shelves in a room. The works could be reformed, but no easily nor cleanly. Data, however, those 1’s and 0’s, is sent, received, and shuttled around in packets, the fragmentation and compressibility of the whole, unlike with analog works, supporting efficiency, portability and far reaching usability for research and creativity.

The shift to digital workflows has necessitated a major shift in how we conceptualize the use and storage of assets. Creators, owners, records managers, and archivists are no longer the sole stakeholders in how documents and materials are taken care of long term. There is now a greater need to understand data management, technological infrastructure, and the particulars of software, hardware, files types, codecs and more. Likewise, the ease of creating and versioning digital works has led to an explosion in the number of files (as well as the number of network, local, and detachable drives to squirrel them away on), resulting in an overwhelming bevy of content to track and maintain. In a corporate or institutional environment, a creator or overseer of digital assets must either educate oneself on these topics or rely to a greater degree on IT departments to help manage their materials.

Integration and collaboration between departments is an essential component of organizational success today -– sharing resources, eliminating redundancy, and open communication help prevent the waste and lack of innovation that can doom an organization to irrelevancy and worse. However, the people who should be in control of setting policies for file management and for selection and implementation of asset management tools — the archivists and records managers out there — have ceded too much ground to a pure IT mindset.

As I see it, providing solutions to problems means applying one’s areas of expertise to derive something that attempts to approach a balanced mix of functionality, efficiency, usability, and elegance. In the world of archives and media collections, this means, among other things, making decisions about metadata, file types, storage systems, and distribution systems that support findability, longevity, and flexibility for current and future use. Under an IT mindset, solutions hinge, among other things, more on processing speed, maximizing storage capacity, decreasing time to market or implementation, and monitoring data flows. Of course these things matter to people using or providing access to digital assets, but the paths to the end solution — compression or low resolution, out-of-the-box asset management, decentralized or uncontrolled metadata creation, etc. — are fraught with hazards for media. By not taking a more active role in the policy and decision making process, caretakers for media collections put the safety and usability of their assets at risk as well as their own ability to perform their responsibilities to the collection and to the organization.

At their core files are just data, but the ways we manage, use, interact, and create with them rely on intellectual, humanistic, or organizational structures that step away from data and back into nuance, language, and user experience. When we bandy about terms such as digital archive and digital asset management, we are actually using broad categorizations to simplify references to a host of complex and distinct solutions for working with file-based collections, solutions that vary greatly depending on the avenues of access and the functional needs of the organization.

This is especially true with audiovisual content, which presents much different needs and distribution methods than straight text files, including considerations for time-based presentation, aesthetic quality, and the management of very large files. For example, distributing assets publicly over the Internet may utilize lower-quality, “access copy” versions of content in a system designed to promote simple search and playback through streaming. Distributing assets internally to a marketing or development department may instead utilize high-resolution copies of content that can be downloaded and edited into new assets, retrieved through a system that promotes advanced search and integration with editing software. But both of these solutions only support findability and usability for media collections; they do not represent the needs of preservation for the highest resolution originals or preservation masters. These versions are infrequently accessed and, for audiovisual content, may range in the hundreds or thousands of gigabytes per file, thus solutions may include offline storage and ought to include redundancy and geographical separation of backups.

This is one area where the interpretation of what an archive is and what an archive does come into conflict. In environments such as email programs, “archiving” has traditionally been used to mean moving data off into deep storage so it is not eating up active space needed for incoming information. This is considered to be data maintained primarily under retention policies and is not meant to be quickly searched for and called up. Deep storage has its place as a strategy, but it should not be confused with the true sense or value of an archive or collection. An archive is a living resource within an organization, maintaining legacy assets but also bringing in new creations, and providing accessibility to both…If the proper resources and support are allocated to the archive itself. Archives are long-term investments, paying off over time by extending the usability of short-term investments, i.e., acquisition and creation of assets. Shortchanging the archive’s ability to do its work now devalues past and current efforts by denying them a future.

Archivists have centuries of tradition, learning, and research which have informed the development of current practices, with an increasing focus on managing digital collections. IT professionals have their own areas of expertise, but these do not expand to all aspects of dealing with file-based materials. Tracking complex relationships among related or derivative assets… Providing accessibility at the intellectual rather than just the physical level… Selecting file formats and codecs based on potential longevity and fidelity to analog source originals… Developing metadata models that adhere to professional standards and that support the activities of collection management… These and more are areas of digital archiving that rely on data practices but that include considerations well beyond those of ground level data management. Today’s archival professional needs to collaborate with IT — as well as many other departments — but we also need to step up and take back control of those aspects of our collections that rightfully belong in our care.

— Joshua Ranger

Are You Celebrating World Day For Audiovisual Heritage 2011 Correctly

As we sit under the Heritage Eucalyptus Tree amongst our non-destructively opened and carefully unpacked and documented acid-free gift boxes, beaming with joy over finally getting that relapped 4-track 1/4″ audio head, that PAL 3/4″ U-matic deck which just needs a little bit of soldering work, or that secreted away barrel of 1,1,1-Trichloroethane, I feel that we should take a moment to reflect a little bit.

Yes, World Day for Audiovisual Heritage is a magical time of year, full of treasures revealed and correctly presented aspect ratios…But, have we become so distracted by the materiality of archiving that we have lost touch with the true reason for the season, that we have forgotten the deeper meaning of this day?

There are many lessons to draw from this, such as the correct care and handling of audiovisual materials includes not putting them in your mouth. Aside from this, however, we should also understand that Heritage is not always the transcendant pinnacle of culture. Our heritage, the products of our existence, can just as often be drivel, pablum, doggerel, dogma, pedantry, cruel, ugly, ephemeral, temporal, banal, tiresome, empty, tedious, and unworthy of notice.

That being the case, those are the things that need an equal amount of our advocacy. As caretakers, archivists are responsible for preserving the full picture of a culture, everything on the continuum from depravity to beauty, from the sophomoric to the beatific, from the “Meh” to the “Oh, man!” There is power in the content, but, as important, there is power in the audiovisual medium that reaches or affects people in untold ways, which is why our audiovisual heritage matters, whether projected on 35mm nitrate or viewed online from an uploaded cell phone video.

So today, sit back, put a nice drink in your mouth (It’s okay! I said you could!), and enjoy the mess that is being human that we try so hard to capture and define in the frame.

— Joshua Ranger

Association For Recorded Sound Collections Releases AVPS Co-Ordinated Metadata Study

The Association for Recorded Sound Collections Technical Committee (ARSC TC) recently announced the release of their “Study of Embedded Metadata Support in Audio Recording Software: Summary of Findings and Conclusions”. AudioVisual Preservation Solutions President Chris Lacinak and Consultant Peter Oleksik played significant roles in co-ordinating the study and authoring the report, along with invaluable contributions from Walter Forsberg (NYU), Mike Casey (Indiana University), Marcos Sueiro Bal (WNYC Radio), Tom Endres (BMS/Chace), Tommy Sjöberg (Folkmusikens hus), Bruce Gordon (Harvard University), Preston Cabe (George Blood Audio & Video), and the full Technical Committee.

According to the ARSC press release, the study was designed by the Technical Committee to evaluate “support for embedded metadata within and across a variety of audio recording software applications” in order to assess two primary questions:

1. How well does embedded metadata persist, and is its integrity maintained, within any given file as it is handled by various applications over time?

2. How well is embedded metadata handled during the process of creating a derivative?

The findings of the study are of major importance to individuals and organizations concerned with the long-term use and management of digital audio files, concluding that “persistence and integrity issues are prevalent across the audio software applications studied”. Until now the internal workings of files and software studied here have been obscure or inaccessible to the majority of people who work with digital audio. Thanks to the methodologies developed by the Technical Committee and the development of tools like BWF MetaEdit, that knowledge and the means for integrity testing have been opened up to archivists, producers, engineers, and other stakeholders. AVPS is honored to have had the opportunity to contribute to this work.

Chris Lacinak Addressing 131st Audio Engineering Society Convention

AVPS Founder and President Chris Lacinak will be co-presenting the workshop “Got Metadata? Historical, Cultural, and Future Issues of Information Association for Archiving Audio Materials” at the 131st Audio Engineering Society (AES) Convention taking place in New York this week. Along with workshop Chair Thomas Ross Miller (New York University) and co-Panelist Holger Grossmann (Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT), the session will “[explore] the past, present, and future of metadata standards in archives and preservation” with case studies that show how “metadata is an integral component of preservation and an essential part of the audio object” and that “meaningful access depends on effective linkage to information stored as metadata.”

As a follow up to the ARSC Technical Committee research study he led and AVPS’s work with the Federal Agencies Digitization Working Group, Chris’ presentation will focus on the use and persistence of embedded metadata in content digitized from analog audio sources. Chris’ article published in this summer’s International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives Journal discussing this topic and the ARSC-TC study gave an eye-opening look at how various audio processing and editing tools handle digital files and the implications they may have on the fidelity of archival materials in a digital preservation environment. Important stuff, this. Check out the article or come see us at the Convention.

AVPS Joins NYPR At Digital Asset Symposium

AudioVisual Preservation Solutions Senior Consultant Kara Van Malssen will be speaking with New York Public Radio/WNYC Archive Manager John Passmore this Friday at the 2011 Association of Moving Image Archivists Digital Asset Symposium in Hollywood, CA. The Symposium provides a non-judgmental space for organizations to present case studies of current digital asset management projects in order to educate the production, caretaker, and vendor communities on the real world challenges of implementing DAM solutions and the various decisions made and approaches taken.

Kara and John will be presenting about the NYPR Archive’s role in the difficult transition many media companies are facing in the shift from radio/television producers to multi-platform content producers. As the manager of legacy content and the repository for newly produced content, the Archives are at the center of this transition with the responsibility to make sure that assets can be used by producers, editors, hosts, and the public with consistency and quality across those many internal and public-facing platforms. As part of John’s larger discussion about NYPR’s efforts to digitize, preserve, and provide access to their 80+ years of content, Kara will be there to discuss AVPS’ role in developing an Archives-centric collection management tool and metadata exchange mechanisms. These projects are contributing to NYPR’s abilities to integrate content management systems across multiple departments and provide greater access to materials in-house and via their website.

John and Kara join other panelists Steven Anastasi, Vice President Technical Operations and Media Archives at Warner Bros.; Andrea Kalas, VP of Archives at Paramount Pictures, Sean Vilbert, Director of Digital Archives at Paramount Pictures, and Mark Lemmons, CTO at Thought Equity Motion; Steve Davis, VP/COO at Crawford Media Management; Brewster Kahle, Digital Librarian and Founder of Internet Archive; and Sam Gustman Executive Director at USC Digital Repository. Quite a show! Registration is still open online through the 21st of September, so check it out if you’re in town.

Insuring The Past

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