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Collective Individualism

New York Times Columnist (and fellow Oregonian) Nicholas Kristof was interviewed on WNYC’s On The Media last month about his approach to being what they termed an “advocacy journalist.”

The gist of it is, advocacy seems to be much more effective when approached as the story of a single individual, that the desire to give aid or help dampens when faced with too many people to think about. I was reminded of a section in Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being where she writes of the difficulty of trying to comprehend the thousands of deaths caused in a South Seas ferry accident. Overwhelmed by the numbers, she experiences more pain over not being able to feel for their suffering than she can muster for their actual suffering. However, as the research study Kristof cites suggests, that decrease in sympathy and the impetus to help doesn’t even need that many people to start taking effect; it begins when the number of people rises to two.

Now I’m not sure if we should be patting ourselves on the back or preparing a suit for copyright infringement, but Kristof’s take on the issue is the same as the base building block of our YADA! initiative — to tell individual success stories about archivists as a means of advocacy and of inspiration to others.

But seriously, it’s a widespread concept used across many sectors in various approaches. We chose to tell success stories because there seems to be plenty of focus on the opposite as people get caught up in the list of problems laid out ahead, almost inversing the old quote about success having a thousand fathers. Making people aware of the challenges faced in media archiving has its place in garnering support, but maintaining that backing and further encouraging its growth means showing the positive results of support.

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I think the idea expressed by Kristof and in the study can be extrapolated out to other areas of conceptual disconnect. We’ve written before about using specific examples or designing smaller scale, more quickly accomplished projects when starting out with your advocacy efforts to administration or funders. It can also be a way to not feel overwhelmed by 100 Paige boxes full of generic blank audiocassettes, by finding ways to think about them as “individual” segments to be approached one at a time. Every piece of media has a story — both as an object with a history and as content — but that’s something that can be lost when faced with the masses of reels and cassettes and unorganized file structures. Maybe stepping back to “listen” to and relate the individual stories of our media will help us better be able to listen to our media content into the future.

— Joshua Ranger

AVPS Releases New Grant Tracking Calendar (YADA!Cal)

We all know the drill: an e-mail comes through the listserv reminding us that the deadline for the Such & Such Grant for Thus & Thus is two weeks away. This sends us barreling headlong in a mad dash to ferret out some project, any project to cobble together some sort of application for…Or we sit and, before deleting the e-mail from our inbox, think, “Aw, man, I gotta apply for that next year…”

With this in mind AudioVisual Preservation Solutions, as part of our Your Archive Deserves Advocacy! (YADA!) initiative, has developed a free internet calendar that lists deadlines, reminders, links, and short descriptions of grants available for media archiving and preservation related projects. Using the .ics file format through the assistance of iCal Exchange, you can subscribe to the calendar and its updates through iCal, Outlook, Google Calendar, or a number of other calendar programs. Subscribing to the calendar feed will insert the “events” into your calendar program of choice so that you can more easily track and plan for future granting cycles. Events will be defined as their own set within your calendar which you can display or hide as you see fit through your program’s settings. As new deadlines are announced or new granting opportunities discovered we will update the main calendar. Those changes will be reflected in your own subscription.

Check out our Tools page or the Subscription Instructions for more information about the YADA! Archiving & Preservation Grants Calendar (YADA!Cal).

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Sometimes it seems funding opportunities do arise suddenly and require a quick reaction to capitalize on. However, any Development Department will tell you that those opportunities are a result of planning, cultivation, and engagement, and that the overall approach to establishing sustainability must be proactive, not reactive. Becoming a better advocate for your collections means becoming more aware and communicating more about the issues that can affect your collection both negatively and positively. One way to start filling in some of the gaps in awareness is to be prepared, and help prepare others in your organization, for funding opportunities before they flutter by again.

— Joshua Ranger

WEB On The Web On MLK

I’ve been happy today to see / hear all of the newly found or released recordings of Martin Luther King, Jr. I think it speaks a lot to the importance of audiovisual materials and archives to the formation and continuity of society. I also think Martin Luther King, Jr. would be the first to admit that his work and success was built upon the work of many others that came before him, and would need to be continued by many others after him. In that spirit, from the Dept of Special Collections and University Archives, UMass Amherst, a documentary of the dedication of W.E.B. Du Bois’ homesite in Great Barrington, Massachusetts in 1969:

One person can be an inspiration and symbolize much that is beyond his or her original reach, but history is built by the millions. Hopefully that singular inspiration will also create a desire to dig deeper and discover more that history has to offer. Happy researching, and Happy MLK Day!

— Joshua Ranger

Making Hollywood Myths

he New York Times Business section had an article today about the financial difficulty MGM is having (“In Hollywood, Grappling With Studios’ Lost Clout“). While MGM seems to be the worst off, the article suggests that the situation is representative of the problems and lowered values that all film studios are having.

Reading this reminded me of one of my pet peeves, one which I have been trying to avoid encountering the past year and a half: The taken as gospel historical interpretation that film attendance rose and movies solaced us during the Depression. This hoary, supposed truism is marched out whenever financially rough times arise or are spoken about, the current recession included.

This statement has bugged me for years, possibly because I don’t like to follow accepted wisdom without vetting it first, but also because it seemed like the kind of thing that merely sounds true. Something that gets postulated once, seems to make sense, and then is repeated without further research. True, some of the financial problems MGM and others now face are related to more complicated issues of debt load, corporate structuring, and lowered credit availability, but they still aren’t actually making that much money from movies. As the article points out, MGM only released one film in 2009 and the film-making arms of other better-off studios / entertainment companies are not considered the major part of the corporate value.

So if we’re in the midst of a recession, and are being constantly told that therefore we should be attending the movies to drown our sorrows, why are the studios not more well off? Well, if you review the numbers from the first years of the Great Depression, you find a similar story when, in fact, four of the five major studios filed for bankruptcy or went into receivership. Tino Balio in The American Film Industry (pages 255-256) points out the following statistics:

Average Weekly Attendance (in Millions):
1929: 80
1932: 60
1933: 60

Studio Profits (in $Millions)

Of course the studios did recover and had become highly profitable again by the 1940s. Perhaps this end result is where the belief in the studios’ success through the Depression comes from, but the re-emergence is only half the story.

To me, this underscores the importance of archives and of promoting the actual work that archivists and preservationists do. Somewhat like a “What have you done for me lately?” attitude, there is a “Whatever has happened most lately is how things have always been” attitude towards history. Without the archival research done by Tino Balio (and the existence of that research material) we would have no argument against believing that the final state of the film industry during the Depression was its actual state during the entire period. Likewise, without documentation and stories about the work it takes to preserve, restore or even just maintain a piece of media, the fact of those necessary efforts are subsumed by the existence of a completed instantiation. “It’s on DVD so it’s all good”, besides being plain wrong, is all denouement and no rising action, none of the interesting or important part of the tale.

Hollywood is not the original dream factory. The ability to create myths or gloss over history existed first in our minds. The means of distribution are just more powerful nowadays. The wonderful thing about being an archivist is the dedication to preserving both the beauty of the myth and beauty of the underlying truth for discovery by all.

— Joshua Ranger

Things That Shouldn’t Be Archived #4 — Holiday Edition

It’s an old one, but the upcoming holiday made me think of it. Many people are incredulous at how tightly the King estate controls use of MLK’s works and image. This commercial makes me feel like maybe that’s not such a bad thing:

I mean, Abe Lincoln and George Washington selling sheets and towels, that just makes sense — but could you imagine being bombarded with similar type ads featuring King all weekend?

— Joshua Ranger

Facing Friendsterly Fire

I have a confession to make: Tradition holds that my lineage comes from one of the Lost Tribes of Friendster. I think this news story confirms the family lore.

Internet Archaeologists Find Ruins Of ‘Friendster’ Civilization

The scenario is ludicrous, but like good comedy (and horror) can do this piece from The Onion reflects an anxiety gnawing at the larger society. In this case, the fear that the digital world moves too fast for us to keep up, that we are always in danger of becoming culturally obsolete, and that whatever we are “in to” is actually a lame waste of time. I don’t really have a good argument in defense of the relative coolness of my own tastes, but I could argue that our fear of the speed of the digital age is somewhat misplaced.

Not scientifically but conceptually thinking, time moves at different rates. We can speak of watching a film as a short 2 1/2 hours or of a long day at work, or marvel at the quickness in the passing of a year. In the experience of the everyday, time does not seem to be on our side. It’s something we struggle against to slow down or speed up. Because we are in the midst of technological or cultural changes they seem to come at us furiously, constantly shifting the playing field and testing our skills at adaptation. Part of that adaptation is mocking what we left behind — that is, of course, until it shifts into an object of nostalgia.

History and memory, however, take a slower, more constant rate that looks at the bigger picture. History may or may not be concerned with the trends in communication and information sharing in the early 21st century, but it certainly will not care about who was the fastest to Tweet the news about Michael Jackson’s death.

This doesn’t mean we should trash content we currently find to be culturally insignificant. Preservation of the day-to-day record is what will enable the future to interpret the past — not necessarily through just its content but also through the fact of its existence and formulation. This is where our responsibilities as archivists lie, but it’s also where our anxiety over the speed of the digital age should be more focused and transformed into positive actions. There are an overwhelming number of issues surrounding the preservation of digital materials, but there are also a number of standards, guidelines, and recommendations being produced by organizations like The Library of Congress, IASA, PrestoSpace, and even little old us. Shifts in the digital landscape make us feel like we’re being left behind. That feeling is exacerbated by inaction, but, more importantly, it is mitigated by having a digital strategy in place that can transform those seismic seeming shifts into minor, day-to-day events that are easily addressed.

So if you haven’t already, start making a plan. For those of you that have planned out a digital preservation strategy, where did you start and what resources did you find helpful? The only thing I beg of you is please please please have good descriptive and contextual metadata. I don’t want some future generation finding something like the above video, and then not be able to tell that it’s satire and start to think that we were, like, totally lame. Embarrassing!

— Joshua Ranger

Up Selling Selling Out

Bono made a spot of noise in a recent New York Times op-ed piece where he advocated stricter intellectual property controls over digital media. Much of the immediate reaction branded him as a new Lars Ulrich, the Metallica drummer who brought suit against Napster for promoting the illegal downloading of music, but Krist Novoselic, the bassist from Nirvana, wrote a response in the Seattle Weekly supporting Bono’s points.

Essentially, Bono and Novoselic argue that piracy and/or the inability to realize high return on content hamper artistic expression rather than promote it because creators do not earn enough money to be able to focus on their work or invest in producing a higher quality product. This is similar to an argument put forth on a recent WNYC Soundcheck (“Smackdown: Music in Commercials”) where Mark Caro and Eric Deggans debated the use of music in advertising.

One side of the argument would claim that licensing music for advertising is the dreaded “selling out” and detracts from the artistry of the music. The other side claims music has always been a commercial venture, artists need to make money to live and cannot subsist on record sales, and licensed songs expose the music to people who may not have heard it otherwise. Of course, this last point for increased exposure is also one those advocating looser intellectual property controls use.

This is one of those unending circular arguments that will likely never achieve resolution — there are too many emotional and monetary issues wrapped up in it for anybody to concede anything. That’s all fine and good for scholarly debates, but as archivists well know, trying to muck through these issues in real world scenarios is not all that pleasant. We typically find ourselves stuck in the middle of that mire, pulled by our responsibility to provide access to as many people as possible and our responsibility to legal and ethical concerns. Anyone who has ever done a rights assessment of an audiovisual work — especially one created pre-Internet distribution — quickly begins to wish there were no copyright laws. But that review is a necessary component of enabling access. The problem is not that copyright exists, but rather that as currently written the laws are too arcane for the laity to interpret and follow.

As you can see from my own circular spin on the topic, it’s not an issue to be solved in this forum. Perhaps, as with quicksand, the solution is to relax and float to the top rather than struggle and sink further. In other words, there may be ways to use the problems we encounter with copyright to promote the difficulties archives run into. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard or read, “Hey, why isn’t that on DVD/CD/Etc. yet?” with the suggestion being that whoever owns the material is stupid, lazy, and/or greedy for not releasing the work for consumption by others. Excluding Orphan works, the reasons are often related to issues of cost, a large chunk of which is typically the price of obtaining copyright clearances for all relevant parties. It took decades for Killer of Sheep, one of the great American films, to be commercially released mainly because of the cost of music licensing. And famously, the great Civil Rights documentary Eyes on the Prize has been in and out of limbo for years because the original licensing deals ended and have not been able to be fully renewed. The problem isn’t always that one single clearance is too expensive; multiple smaller licenses will add up or it can be difficult to even figure out who or where the rights holder is.

As we have seen with Congress addressing the issue of Orphans, it takes years of advocacy and work to effect meaningful change in the law. If we want change rather than evasion or stagnation we need to make it a point of discussion with the powers that be as well as the general public. Getting people to admit there is a problem is the first step to recovery. So next time your cousin starts complaining about how The Six Million Dollar Man isn’t available on DVD, explain how much both would cost in today’s dollars (Steve Austin’s upgrades and the home video licensing) and create some wider exposure for our work.

— Joshua Ranger

AVPS Presenting At ALA Midwinter 2010

Chris Lachttps://www.weareavp.com/team/chris-lacinak/inak will be addressing the Digital Conversion Interest Group at the American Library Association’s 2010 Midwinter Meeting in Boston this Saturday. Chris will speak on issues around digital video preservation, including reformatting and accessioning born digital video.

ALA Midwinter 2010 will take place on January 15-19, 2010 at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center near Downtown Boston. The Midwinter Meetings are primarily a business meeting for the Association, but there are also a number of Interest Groups, Discussion Groups, and Forums that meet concurrently as well some extra-session educational opportunities. It’s a great opportunity to start getting involved and to meet colleagues, as well as the chance to visit a great city. Catch a flick at The Brattle or Harvard Film Archive while you’re at it. We look forward to seeing you there!

But Is It Art?

I caught this little BBC news story (“The cassette comes back as art”) the other day via the Social A/V Archivist’s blog. I clicked through on the link because I thought it might be about the use of tape as an art material. Turns out it was a trend piece on the renaissance of the audiocassette in England, specifically as a medium for sound art. (Silly me for inferring something beyond the controlled vocabulary of “cassette” in the title.)

I was interested in my imagined topic because during some gallery visits this fall I noticed that there was typically at least one piece which included a pile of magnetic tape as one of the materials. 1/4″ tape hanging from a tree. 1/2″ tape strewn on a platform with eggshells mixed in. Cassettes with tape that had been detached from the hub and was spooling on the floor as playing from open faced Walkmans.

I understood some of what they were trying to express through the selection of magnetic tape as material, but it also made me feel sad for the way tape is thought of and treated. Almost every day when I’m walking through the city I see a busted open VHS or audiocassette, its innards sprawling and knotted across the sidewalk. I’ve often wondered if film was ever treated this way, if at some point in mid-century New York film was just such a ubiquitous commodity that people threw it on the street to blow around in the bay winds until it clung to a parking meter or against someone’s leg.

Certainly there has been an overwhelming amount of cultural detritus published on tape, but even the most dog-eared, broken-binding, ripped-cover copy of Let’s Go: France 1988 is placed lovingly on one’s stoop for someone else to pick up and read. Maybe the issue isn’t one of easy disposal of unworthy content, but rather an issue of disrespect for a certain format type. I’ve often wondered if magnetic tape suffers less love because it has no visually noticeable content like film or paper to draw us in. Do some of these resultant attitudes towards tape – that it’s cheap, plastic, replaceable, low quality – only apply to our old UB40 cassette collection, or might it creep into our general attitude towards magnetic media and subconsciously affect how we treat even materials we’re interested in maintaining? And what might this mean for digital files, which we have even less tangible connection to? And c’mon really, eggshells? What does that juxtaposition even have to do with anything?

— Joshua Ranger

Testing One’s Resolve

Most people I speak to who are beyond their 10 year high school reunion and use Facebook have at least one story about reconnecting with someone from their school years. Typically someone “really attractive” who they didn’t date but “always had a thing with.” I must have been hanging out with the wrong group of people, because the only cohorts that contact me are the ones who were really into the Anarchist’s Cookbook, or who knew the schedule for when a new batch of records were put on the shelves at Goodwill, or who were always busy talking about Dr. Who on newsgroups.

The other day one of these old compatriots started IMing with me. Sorensen (his last name, which is what we all called him by because there were too many other kids with his same first name) lived in the hills, wore an Indiana Jones fedora all the time, and his dad had a field full of 50s and 60s Buicks in various states of disrepair.

“Happy New Year, Josh”

“Happy New Year, Sorensen. How are things back in the ‘Burg?”

“Cold for this area. We actually got snow the other day. Global warming ha!”

“Wasn’t it just in the 60s like two weeks ago?”

“Sure was. I was walking around in a t-shirt! Crazy man, crazy. So you got any New Year’s Resolutions?”

“Sort of but not — I try to set goals to accomplish during the year rather than making some general behavioral change. I’m more likely to stick with a change if it’s embedded in working towards something. Like, I want to qualify for the Boston Marathon this year. That will push me to work harder on my running than just saying I want to run more or something. What about you?”

“Nah, man, I don’t do any of that. It’s just setting yourself up for failure.”

“You mean because nobody sticks with their resolutions for more than a week anyway?”

“No, that’s not it. I’m pretty stubborn when I set my mind to it. Like one year my resolution was to drink less Coke, and I did it, too!”

“I remember that — you drank Pepsi instead and drank about twice as much of it as you did Coke.”

“Well that’s because it wasn’t as good as Coke and I had to drink more to get my fix. Then when the year was up and I could go back to drinking Coke, it just didn’t taste the same anymore. I couldn’t drink either and had to find something else. You see, failure! Because I swore off Coke for a year I lost my love for it. Except for the few years when Jolt was around I’ve had a hole in my life ever since.”

“But wasn’t the point to drink less soda, not to just stop drinking a particular one?”

“Well that’s a stupid question. I would have resolved to drink less soda then, wouldn’t I have? But I didn’t have a problem with that. I might have a Sprite or a Mountain Dew every once in a while, but not too often. The problem was that I was drinking too much Coke.”

“But then you solved that, didn’t you?”

“But at what cost, Josh. At. What. Cost?”

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Chatting with Sorensen made me consider a few things:
1. I need to spend less time online.
2. There are many interpretations of failure.
3. If personal change is so difficult, how are we supposed to begin to tackle institutional change?

This last is one of the big struggles for archivists in trying to advocate for their collections and for trying to enact necessary change for necessary care. It’s a big job that will not be accomplished in the first week of the new year, or even by the end of the year itself. But steps towards a bigger goal can be achieved in digestible chunks. I take a lot of my resolve from my experience with running. It’s a very mental sport that depends on one’s patience, of being able to take one’s time to build up to different levels of accomplishment. But at the same time, one needs to know when to push and go big, to challenge what one thinks one can do and achieve something beyond one’s comfort zone. You might fail at it, but the beautiful thing is that you wake up the next morning and try again.

So I agree with Sorensen — I don’t care for New Year’s Resolutions. They set you up for failure because a year is too short of a time. We’re in this for the long haul and need to plan for the big investment. It’s a lot of work to do, but I reckon that’s why Sorensen needed all of the soda to keep himself going.

— Joshua Ranger

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