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Speed Trap At The Crossroads

Were Robert Johnson’s original recordings mastered at an increased rate of speed? A recent Soundcheck episode on WNYC dredged up Guardian journalist Jon Wilde who recently dredged up an old rumor about the Johnson recording speeds. Story goes that either through technical inadequacies or through the producer’s decision to make the recording more ‘lively’ and ‘energetic’, Robert Johnson’s 29 extant recordings from two separate periods were all mastered 20% faster than actuality.

The rumor stops short of claiming that William Shakespeare was the producer on all of the recordings (or should that be that there is absolutely no way Shakespeare could have produced all of them), but the content-hungry nature of the internet demands that such attention-grabbing statements receive attention. I’ll leave the rebuttal in the capable hands of a follow-up show that aired the next week:

Both of these shows produced a lot of good discussion on the concept of what constitutes a ‘faithful’ recording. A number of the responses tended towards the ‘you cannot reproduce reality so this argument is meaningless’ vein. Despite my years of PoMo Aversion Therapy (widely known as FRED), I’m sympathetic to such a point of view, but I’d also like to consider it in a slightly different light.

One that assumes that things actually matter.

Because they do.

What I mean here is that, yes, trying to portray reality is like a one-legged man trying to dropkick a greased pig that is constructed of ghostly straws. However, this unreliability or uncertainty about ‘truth’ shouldn’t be a deterrent to decision or action. In the world of audiovisual archiving, there are any number of preservation practices which will never fall under a single resolved answer as to the correct method. Reasonable, empassioned practitioners are bound to disagree because they care deeply about doing what is best.

I’m reminded of a recent New Yorker article about the detection of art forgeries (“The Mark of a Masterpiece”). Parallel to the narrative thrust of the piece is a comparison of methodological approaches. One favors more vague notions of distinction, expertise, and taste. The other favors a more analytical or scientific approach. These sames sides play themselves out in the Robert Johnson debate — those that say the newly slowed down recordings just sound right, and those that consider the difficulty of obtaining consistently modified recordings over time and location given the technology of the period. Both are convincing arguments…depending on one’s own inherent predilections, that is.

As media archivists and preservationists we are at the crossroads of technology and art, of maintaining the object and maintaining the essence. Assessing and achieving a balance there upon is one of the great challenges of the field. And I’m not so sure a resolution is desirable in this case. Robert Johnson sold his soul at the crossroads to achieve that perfect balance of emotion and skill. All that got us was a sliver of recordings that we’ve struggled to preserve and that have engendered unending arguments about their value and authenticity. I’m not sure if we can afford a step down in generational loss from Johnson’s deal to what our own may result in.

— Joshua Ranger

My Mistress’ Eyes Are Nothing Like The Sun

I had the fortune of studying literature in two distinct ideological periods (or perhaps just in two ideologically distinct universities [or perhaps it is just a sign of my advancing age]). First in a strict socio-political cultural studies milieu that was a reaction to the decadence of l’art pour l’art patriarchal imperialist literature. Second in a material culture-centric atmosphere with a heavy concentration on Victorian aestheticism. This dichotomous education either makes me very well-rounded or extremely useless.

I tend to favor the latter evaluation because, outside of a thesis on the socio-aesthetics of online catalogs, I haven’t had much chance to apply all that book-learnin’. Perhaps that’s why I was excited to read Virginia Heffernan’s recent Sunday Times Magazine piece, “How HDTV Scrambles Beauty Standards”. The problem of HDTV exposing every line, splotch, make-up-covered-blemish, facial hair, and — especially — plastic surgery scar is nothing new. What I found novel in Ms. Heffernan’s article was the discussion of how cultural beauty standards may be shaped in part by available image-producing technology. She suggests that stars such as Katharine Hepburn and Harry Belafonte who were admired for more angular looks (high cheekbones, regal noses) would not have become as well established in an HD world as they were when their star image was viewed in the realm of more contrast-y black and white shot by cinematographers well-versed in established lighting and capture techniques that simultaneously highlighted and softened. She also points out that people with contrasting coloring (dark hair, pale skin, ruddy cheeks) do not look good in HD. Stars like Montgomery Clift and Ava Gardner looked dreamy in Technicolor — their extreme coloring playing to the heightened unreal reality of the color process — but those same features can look garishly unreal in the so-real-it-hurts reflection of HD.

So what does look good in HD? Heffernan’s argument is that the format favors the monochromatic, pointing out Jessica Alba as a potential ideal. The article suggests a positive aspect of this (Alba comes from an extremely mixed cultural heritage; the ‘browning’ of America is becoming an accepted norm) but there is also a subtextual negative in her use of language: the general even-ing out of visual / artistic culture to a middle-of-the-road banality where contrast and originality are subsumed by an overwhelming sameness.

Admittedly, from the ground, that point of view sometimes seems to be the case. They don’t make stars / movies like they used to… The culture is growing dumb and lazy… Nobody cares about skill and quality… These concerns are well known. More well known than one might know. The same complaints about backsliding, the weakening of our character and culture, and the continuing downward spiral of America have been repeatedly expressed since the colonial period, most likely since the second colonizing ship hit shore. (And I won’t even get into the long-standing theories of degeneration from the purity of Native cultures or Buffonian generational decay engendered by the atmosphere of the Americas.)

I’m afeared that I’m starting to sound like a rambling old fuddy-duddy, discontented that they just don’t make ’em like they used to. However, I run at the mouth so because I feel it’s important to be aware of these historical trends and cognizant of technological and aesthetic shifts in modes of expression. Reformatting is a fact of audiovisual preservation, and within that process is the demand to maintain the highest possible fidelity to the originating image / signal / object / etc.

The desire in this process is to keep that original looksound, the aesthetic quality tied to the historical development of the medium and related creative processes. The problem is that, first, these fidelicious attempts have a certain reliance upon human memory and human perception as part of determining the success of reformatting. This fact is what it is. Second to consider is the problem that started this whole post (remember a few paragraphs back?): the fact that technologies change and it is not always possible to capture the same intangible quality from generation to generation.

This is why we at AVPS always recommend that important originals be maintained after a preservation reformatting project — a better technology for image / signal capture may come along later; it is necessary to quality check originals versus new derivatives; etc. — but it is also why we recommend maintaining or achieving the ability, where feasible, to play back original assets. Without being able to see and assess how a particular format from a particular time period presented itself, we lose the cultural knowledge of how that content originally looked and why it was considered of aesthetic value. This isn’t to say that all people must only watch films or videos in their original format, but rather, that that original display be available so that later caretakers reformatting to new presentation technologies can develop means to emulate older styles… Or so that later content creators can learn from and artistically emulate the skills of the past. We see this in the development of .mp3 where the ultimate goal is to revise the format to the point that it can reproduce instrumental music and lower range tones as well as analog formats can. HD is here, and we need to demand that display devices be able to recreate the sharpness, contrast, and range of tones (or limits thereon) that older formats / displays produced, and we also need to expect that creators will become equally skilled with using the new medium.

Things are never the same. They never will be. Until they are, we all have the responsibility to make sure that the way things were remains an accessible knowledge source.

— Joshua Ranger

On PAHR With Expanded Federal Support To Regional, State Archives

** A special Guest Post from Michele DeLia**

In spring 2009, US Congressmen Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) and John McHugh (R-NY) introduced a bill that would grant a total of $50 million per year for five years to be distributed among every state, earmarked for local and regional archives and libraries that hold valuable historical material related to the cultural heritage and national identity of the United States.

Right now, that bill, Preserving the American Historical Record (the PAHR Act), is under review in the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs (S. 3227) and the House Oversight and Government Reform, Subcommittee on Information Policy, Census, and National Archives (H.R. 2256). Backed by Senators Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Carl Levin (D-MI), the PAHR Act has the bipartisan co-sponsorship of 7 US Senators and 59 House Representatives. Additionally, the Society of American Archivists, Council of State Archivists, and the National Association of Government Affairs have partnered in support, and organizations as diverse as the National Genealogical Society, National Coalition for History, American Association for State and Local History, American Library Association, Heritage Preservation, and National Association of Secretaries of State, to name a few, have endorsed the PAHR Act.

In its current form, the PAHR Act would authorize the Archivist of the United States of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to administer monies to states via a competitive formula-based grant program. Each state would receive an equal base amount; the remainder of the full grant award would be calculated based on a population/area formula. On top of this, each state would be required to match 50% of the total funds granted. Over a 5 fiscal-year plan, each State Archives (or other state-level organization designated by the Archivist of the United States) would work with the State Historical Records Advisory Board to manage the local grant program. On a yearly basis, the selected organizations would apply for re-grants and submit documentation on their progress and measured outcomes.

As summarized by the National History Coalition, the funding program has been designed to support the following initiatives through preservation and access to historical records:

• Creation of a wide variety of access tools, including archival finding aids, documentary editions, indexes, and images of key records online.

• Preservation actions to protect original historical records from harm, prolong their lifespan, and preserve them for public use through conservation and creation of avenues for access, including digitization projects, electronic records initiatives, and disaster preparedness and recovery.

• Initiatives to use historical records in new and creative ways to convey the importance of state, territorial, and community history, including the development of teaching materials for K-12 and college students, active participation in National History Day, and support for life-long learning opportunities.

• Programs to provide education and training to archivists and others who care for historical records, ensuring that they have the necessary knowledge and skills to fulfill their important responsibilities.

The PAHR Act would not only provide opportunities for local organizations to carry out diverse new projects of national significance, but would also relieve much of the burden from the current federal grant program, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), also called the “funding arm” of the NARA. The NHPRC, the only private/public grant-making body with the primary mission to fund projects that preserve the US historical record, and since 1964 has awarded grants for a wide range of US preservation activities at the federal, non-federal, nonprofit, state, and local levels. However, the NHPRC is not capable of reaching all archival and records-keeping organizations or funding all necessary projects due to the constraints of their allocated budget and parameters of what activities the granted monies may support. For example, its proscribed guidelines do not extend funds towards conserving archaeological artifacts, museum objects, or works of art — all of which may represent valuable information about our nation’s history. Nor does the NHPRC fund cataloging or preservation efforts of books or other library materials, and as a government institution it is unable to fund preservation of privately owned materials or those held in institutions where assets are subject to “withdrawal upon demand for reasons other than those required by law”.

At the regional or local level it is difficult to find the resources and manpower to properly care for the increasing number of materials that exist on a growing number of (often obsolete) formats. Additionally, the existence of these regional collections is not widely known to the public, which results in a lower level of access and therefore a lower level of regional funding — an issue identified by the Council on Library and Information Resources as the Hidden Collection problem. The strain on one organization to undertake the many faceted projects throughout the United States it simply too great. The NHPRC is currently under review for an increase in their granting authorization level. This would be the first increase in the amount available in almost 20 years. PAHR is a necessary supplement to the NHPRC activities no matter what, but if the authorization increase is not approved by Congress the need for PAHR to address the duty of non-governmental local organizations to preserve and share their records with the general population is even greater. Ultimately, PAHR will contribute to a stronger historical US cultural record about our nation from its inception forward.

On July 1, the House Oversight and Government Reform, Subcommittee on Information Policy, Census, and National Archives cleared H.R.1556 (the bill to reauthorize NHPRC’s available funds from $10 million to $20 million through FY 2014) for review by the full House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Many supporters insist NHPRC needs to increase its funding to meet the demand of maintaining electronic records, and to strengthen best practices at all archival levels via federal/state partnerships. On June 21, the Senate Governmental Affairs and Homeland Security Committee issued a committee report (S. Rep. 111-213) on its version of the NHPRC’s bill (S. 2872), currently on the Senate floor calendar, however it authorized NHPRC at only $10 million.

It is important that this version of H.R.1556 is approved, reaches a full vote before the House and passes, because the increased funds will relieve and enable the NHPRC to fund more US preservation initiatives, and empower organizations to form state/federal partnerships at the local level to build upon and implement best archival practices and standards in their communities. If the PAHR Act is also approved, there would be a total of $60-70 million each year dedicated to the preservation of our nation’s identity, which in part will strengthen the overall security of our country from privacy breaches over time. Contacting your congressmen with respect to each of these bills is a great way to make an impact in passing the PAHR Act.

Despite the high level of sponsorship and endorsement the PAHR Act has built up, it still has a tough row to hoe in getting approved by Congress — let alone just getting to the point of an up-or-down vote. Even in boom times spending on the arts is not extremely popular, and we archivists have not always been able to articulate what we do in a way that incentivizes the provision of adequate levels of monetary support. With the explosion of electronic records, the reliance on the Internet as a primary source for information, and the daily development of new technologies, the greater our need for more trained information specialists and resources to preserve our history. The funding provided through the PAHR Act and NHPRC can save and share with the public valuable records that have been put aside, ignored, or forgotten.

This is where you, fellow archivists, professional small collections managers, librarians, students, history buffs, Americans, or American enthusiasts come in. The Society of American Archivists (SAA) has done a great job on their site (http://www.archivists.org/pahr/) of providing a comprehensive list of resources, letter templates, fact sheets, contacts, etc., as a guideline to help support the bill. Here is an abbreviated action plan to show how you can most easily and efficiently help pass these bills:

Little Action Plan (PAHR LAP)

1. Call your senators and representatives at their Washington offices (preferred) or visit their regional offices. Personal contact such as phone calls get a better response than email.

2. Ask to speak with the Legislative Director (or Regional Director).

3. Make a strong case for why the PAHR Act will save and create new jobs, strengthen the nation’s security, and ease the burden on NHPRC’s grant program.

4. Request that your Senator and/or Representative co-sponsor the bill by contacting the offices of the main Sponsors:

(Senators)
Bryan Hickman (Sen. Hatch)
202-224-5251, [email protected]

Harold Chase (Sen. Levin)
202-224-6221, [email protected]

(Representatives)
Mike Iger (Rep. Hinchey)
202-225-6335, [email protected]

Jason Miller (Rep. McHugh)
202-225-4611, [email protected]

5.Go to opencongress.org and compose a follow-up letter online.

6.Let other people know about this by emailing and posting to Facebook and Twitter.

Other Resources:
Society of American Archivists on PAHR
Senate on Homeland Security and Government Affairs
House Oversight and Government Reform, Subcommittee on Information Policy, Census, and National Archives
State Historical Records Advisory Boards (Google List)

— Michele DeLia

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

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

Things That Shouldn’t Be Archived #5 — High School Edition

Because I care about you, dear reader, and because I care about the development of a more refined culture through the dissemination of audiovisual materials, I was perusing YouTube last night. I happened upon a video simply referred to as “Final Countdown — Acoustic Version”. I will not share that with you here. I feel that Arrested Development has completed the cultural work of that song and it needn’t be further addressed (see — I am looking out for you).

What I stumbled upon next was a video by the same performer, one which brought back a flood of memories:

Thing is, you see, “Thunderstruck” was my graduating class song in high school. I’m not quite sure how that came to pass. It was not a new song at the time, nor had it been incredibly popular like the class songs from preceding years. I’m not saying I disliked the song, but I think my submissions for consideration at that time included some Pink Floyd song, “Staying Alive” arranged for kazoos, and then probably something like Mozart’s Requiem or some such. All I’m saying is, there must have been an arranged effort to nominate an old AC/DC song to commemorate the greatest years of our lives.

It’s true that the past is a foreign country, but so, it sometimes seems now, is my hometown.

Or maybe not. I started looking around for other videos related to “Thunderstruck” and, judging from the number I viewed, found that it’s quite the touchstone for expressing one’s emotions and one’s virtuosity (that is one hell of a guitar riff). I found some fun stuff:

So all in all I had an accelerated ride over the smooth-to-pot-holed road through the neighborhoods of nostalgia, ironic appropriation, kitsch, and detritus. What I learned on my evening vacation was, really, you’ve got to hold onto the night, hold onto the memories, because, although we’ve come to the end of the road, these are days we’ll remember.

Oh — I also learned that, in spite of everything, bagpipes still kinda rock.

AVPS Part Of PBCore 2.0 Team

AudioVisual Preservation Solutions is pleased to announce we are part of the Project Management team on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting PBCore 2.0 Development project. AVPS will be working in tandem with team members from WGBH in Boston, Digital Dawn, and the CPB to help this important endeavor successfully achieve its goals. This is an exciting opportunity for AVPS to collaborate with several top notch organizations and to help further establish a strong metadata standard that can be readily adopted across the audiovisual production and archiving communities worldwide to help facilitate use, preservation, and access by the greatest possible audience. The official press release below:

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting Launches the PBCore 2.0 Development Project

(Washington, DC) – – The Corporation for Public Broadcasting today announced the launch of the PBCore 2.0 Development Project.

The PBCore 2.0 Development Project will expand the existing PBCore metadata standard to increase the ability, on one hand, of content producers and distributors using digital media to classify and describe public media content (audio and video) and, on the other, of audiences to find public media content on a variety of digital media and mobile platforms.

The PBCore 2.0 Development Project will also work to enhance the PBCore standard to ensure that it will be able to satisfy the demands of multiplatform digital content as well as an evolving World Wide Web. Since PBCore’s development in 2005, it has become not only one of the most widely-used metadata standards in the world, but also the basis of other metadata standards. At the same time, in the last five years, the number of digital media applications that would benefit from PBCore has grown significantly. An updated PBCore will benefit not only public broadcasters, but all users of metadata standards based on PBCore.

PBCore 2.0 will be managed by WGBH, AudioVisual Preservation Solutions and Digital Dawn. For more information on the PBCore 2.0 Development Project, please go to www.pbcore.org

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