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Enhancements Are “Sexy” – Efficiencies Are Mundane

While an underlying premise of OTR is that the resources freed by efficiencies can be redirected towards enhancements, it is tempting—as our group has done—to recommend many more enhancements than efficiencies. Enhancements are “sexy;” efficiencies are mundane.

Your Archive Deserves Advocacy! (YADA!)

YOUR ARCHIVE DESERVES ADVOCACY !  (YADA!)

In support of UNESCO World Day for Audiovisual Heritage (October 27, 2009) and American Archives Month, and in celebration of the work being performed by archivists worldwide, AudioVisual Preservation Solutions (AVPS)requests your participation in a project designed to garner support for audiovisual archive preservation planning and project implementation from influencers, policy makers and funding organs.

As consultants and advocates working with audiovisual archives, we contribute to and witness preservation success stories on a daily basis. We understand that those successes were built on sustained long term efforts and collaboration with other internal/external stakeholders, and through community information exchange. Our celebration of these successes can lead to the kind of funding support all archives need in reaching their goals.  We are asking you for your favorite audiovisual preservation experience at your archive. These stories will provide encouragement to other archivists by showing what can be achieved in similar circumstances.

These stories will be published on our website, and some will be selected for use in our ongoing efforts to inform private and public funding decision makers, both of what is being achieved, and what can be achieved with their support.

Our first inclusion is dedicated in support of the spirit underlying UNESCO World Day for Audiovisual Heritage and American Archives Month, and will profile the ongoing story of “The Jazz Loft Project”, www.jazzloftproject.org/index.php an excellent example of how a person or organization convinced of the cultural value of previously inaccessible audiovisual content was able to garner the support necessary to both make unique materials accessible, and to preserve them for posterity.

Because all archives deserve advocacy, your story deserves to be told.

Please contact AudioVisual Preservation Solutions at www.avpreserve.com/you , or send us an e-mail at [email protected] , or call us at 347-241-2920 to leave contact information. We will follow up with guidance on telling your story. Please Support the preservation projects of the archive community overall by getting your story told.

We will provide periodic updates on subsequent phases of this project as it progresses, and a blog will be posted on our website on Wednesday, October 27^th in celebration of UNESCO World day for Audiovisual Heritage.

Thank you for your participation, and we wish you success on all of your preservation projects.

Access Qualities

The Library of Congress has recently posted a number of silent animations to their YouTube channel. I like how you can “see the strings” so to speak (how the animation was done) on this film based on a comic strip by Pop Mormand… but it was cute, too:

This isn’t a dis on the LOC (you have to work with the source material you get, and these are just access copies), but the quality of the sources and resulting transfers and then compressions to a YouTube level format is variable. There’s flickering, light issues, and just some overall poor image quality. Plus I sat and watched them on my laptop while drinking my morning coffe. All in all it wasn’t exactly the pristine cinematic experience.

But there’s a part of me that says that’s all right. I grew up in small Oregon logging town. There was one library within a 60 mile radius, and if it was closed you were out of luck for doing research. There were a few movie theatres (and even a drive-in!), but the edgiest fare we got was something like a double feature of Big Top PeeWee and Short Circuit 2. And that was the county capitol, so there were people who had even less access to these things.

And access is what it comes down to. One of the things that drove me into the field of archiving and preservation was this strong feeling that all people deserve equal access to information, culture, and education. Impossible? Maybe. Can I do something to increase access just a little bit more? Yes. Maintaining preservation standards and striving for archival ideals are important, but creating access to materials is the parallel mission.

I didn’t experience these animations to their fullest, but now I know they exist and I have the desire to see better versions of them, let other people know they exist, and support their further preservation. I also learned a little something about film history and animation. And, ultimately, they made me smile and laugh. Even at this remove from the originals, they brought a little joy to my morning, and I’m grateful to the Library of Congress for making them available.

— Joshua Ranger

Masstransiscope

A follow up about tonight’s talk by Bill Brand at the Transit Museum in Brooklyn on his public art project Masstransiscope. Installed in 1980 in an abandoned subway station and restored in 2008, Masstransiscope basically creates a life-sized zoetrope through the interaction of the moving train and the positioning of the images, lights, and view holes.

This is a magical work of art that surprises and delights me every time I view it on the train, right up there with walking across the Brooklyn Bridge and seeing the Statue of Liberty from the Staten Island Ferry.

Bill Brand is a filmmaker, film preservationist through his company BB Optics, and a teacher of filmmaking and preservation. I caught his talk on this back in June. Entertaining and informative about the mechanics of moving image devices like zoetropes, about his process for creating the work, and about the recent preservation process. Highly recommended to check this out or some of Bill’s other work.

—Joshua Ranger

Andy Lanset Of WNYC Honored By NYART

We tweeted about it last week, but it would be remiss of us to not more fully congratulate Andy Lanset of WNYC Archives for being honored with the Award For Archival Achievement by New York Archivists Roundtable. (Kudos also to the winners of the other awards, Columbia Center for New Media Teaching & Learning and Westchester County Executive Andrew Spano.)

Andy has worked tirelessly to centralize, organize, preserve and make accessible over 80 years worth of broadcast materials in all manner of formats. His efforts have reformatted and digitized a collection that spans almost the entire history of radio and that has become a valuable living resource for WYNC and other users. WNYC  listeners  (and listeners of stations which broadcast WNYC programs) are  reminded of Andy’s contributions and the significance of WNYC’s audio archives on a regular basis. Almost no day goes by where Andy Lanset isn’t thanked and credited on air for making the amazing content held in the WNYC archives accessible for incorporation into current programs.

Andy got his start as a volunteer and then staff reporter at WBAI radio, and in the mid-80s he began freelancing with NPR as well. His work as reporter and story producer led to a greater and greater interest in field recordings and the use of archival materials in documentary pieces. This led to an increasing focus on recording, collecting and preservation work. Through his own initiative and continued pestering regarding the great importance of their collection, Andy essentially created an Archives Department and Archivist position at WNYC in 2000, which quickly grew and has become a model archive. He continues to work closely with the NYC Municipal Archives and their WNYC holdings which make up a significant portion of the older WNYC collection.

Andy’s well deserved honor reminds us of the multi-faceted aspects of being an archivist. It’s easy to get caught up in or bogged down by the technical ins-and-outs of archiving: storage, handling, arrangement, metadata (oh my!)… However, caring for a collection also benefits from a passionate advocacy for its contents. How we express our love for the content and the media.  The stories we tell about the work we do. The ability to place materials in a historical and/or artistic context that all levels of users can understand. Getting across just a little bit of the enthusiasm and joy we feel about our collections and their importance can be a powerful tool for increasing support, funding, and access.

We’re not saving the world, but we’re preserving a little piece of it. Let’s hear it for Andy for doing his part to keep the tape rolling.

Pigeon Message

From NARA’s Historical Document of the Day, transcription of a note sent via messenger pigeon during World War I — The same kind of “media format” referenced in one of our banner images. I guess they had to do an “open with” and “save as” on a typewriter in order to access the attachment.

—Joshua Ranger

America’s Next Top Presidential Libraries Model

The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) recently published their Report On Alternative Models For Presidential Libraries, an institutional review mandated by Congress to develop prospective archive models that would attempt to balance issues of cost savings, improved preservation, and increased access. (Even the big dogs have to deal with the impossible seeming task of producing more while spending less…)

Though not a light read, it does, like many of NARA’s initiatives and reports, offer plenty of tips, inspirations, or supportive arguments for preservation practices and projects. For example, the importance of “non-textual funding” for creating preservation copies of AV materials is underscored. These assets need a different kind of attention than textual materials, and consideration and funding of that “has resulted not only in better access to holdings, but also improved preservation of the original tapes” (pg. 20).

Also of note in the NARA report are sections like the one delineating proposed changes to how presidential records are processed (pgs. 25-26). Combined with the necessary review for sensitive content and the huge amount of materials suddenly available after the end of a presidency, the heavy influx of requests through the Freedom of Information Act created a sluggish response time. Searching through unprocessed folders while trying to maintain provenance and performing traditional start-to-finish processing became a hindrance to acceptable response times.

Instead, as in other archives, the implementation of a tiered system of processing prioritization has been established which takes into consideration content types. Categories such as “frequently requested,” “historically significant,” or “non-sensitive” are prioritized accordingly, thereby contributing to improved resource allocation and speedier progress.

The five alternative models to NARA’s current operational model are too specific to their history, organizational structure, and mission to discuss in depth here. Instead, three additional important points can be gleaned from NARA’s reporting process:

1. As we know too well, the continual spectre of too much work and too few resources is daunting. Strategic partnerships, pooling of resources, or repository models; exploring new areas to use assets or create access; and exploiting powerful new tools and technologies are just some of the things that should be considered in working to improve the functionality of archives and ensuring their long-term sustainability.

2. The consideration of different aspects of centralization versus decentralization is key. Just as certain audiovisual formats require a reconceptualization of the asset that separates the consideration of content from the consideration of the physical carrier, the archive itself can undergo renewed consideration from the idea of a central location to one of multiple / virtual entities. Of course, this must be accomplished while still adhering to fundamental principles of preservation. What this means is that the “virtual” needs to be understood on its own terms in order to be fully and properly utilized, just as some of the unique aspects of audiovisual archiving have needed to be understood separately from traditional paper archiving in order to apply the same kinds of standards and principles.

3. A finer point is held within Alternative Model 4 (pgs. 43-46) of a centralized archival depository where all presidential records would be maintained, unlike the current model where an archive and a museum are dedicated to a single president and those facilities are located, typically, in the president’s home state. This alternative model would involve building a new facility as well as planning and implementing a large scale digital archive for storage and access — certainly daunting, costly tasks. However, what is of note with Alternative Model 4 is that it has the largest initial cost outlay to implement but that, in the long run, it will provide more archiving jobs as costs can be reallocated from what would have been decentralized facilities, will make for more efficient access, and, ultimately, it will save more money than the alternative models offered that are less expensive at the initial implementation.

Alternative Model 4 has its pros and cons like the others, but an important lesson here is one of time. Archiving and preservation are long range efforts concerning the persistence of the past well into the future. As such, they deserve far-sighted planning and goals. This can be a difficult struggle to implement, and may not have results one sees in ones lifetime, but there are ways to model, to plan, and to advocate for the collection and for the generations to come.

— Joshua Ranger

Breaking Apart The Union Catalog — Vol. 1

Google Books has been in the news a lot lately, and that inevitably prompts me to thinking about one of the main things people love and/or hate about Google: The centralization or unification of, more or less, everything. Communication, research, education, work, home, personal management, etc. It is not my place nor my interest to argue the relative beneficence or malevolence of Google. There are plenty of voices doing that, and plenty of people trying to work within or outside the system to help keep it honest. What my mind always comes back to in relation to this topic is the issue of centralization within the practice of archiving and preservation.

The advent and increase of computing tools in libraries and archives has held great promise for significantly increasing capabilities for the storage, discovery, and access of assets, whether they be digitized or not. Those of us that remember performing research projects before the widespread availability of online databases — or even before the subscriptions and portals for them became more streamlined — can attest to the partial fulfillment of this promise. There have of course been many other pushes throughout history to create a centralized repository of information or knowledge well before the digital age. The Oxford English Dictionary, the encyclopedic list of encyclopedias, national libraries, etc. We could be high-minded and discuss the human urge to organize and contain in order to deal with the uncertainties, the multiplicities, the messiness of existence. Or we could discuss it more in terms of efficiency — sure the chase of research is fun, but it can be a luxury to have the time to search so many sources and limits advancements to do work that has already been done before.

What we can say is that, though the universe tends towards decay, the human mind tends to turn away from it and back towards unity. However, we are a frustrating bunch and more often than not turn heel in the face of unity as well. I say this because, in spite of the beautiful dream of a union catalog, and despite the many well-intended and well-organized attempts over the years to create some sort of union catalog, the actualization of the dream and implementation of the various attempts have been a mixed-bag of results. At some point, the plan seems to lose steam or support or gets superseded by something else. Might this be a problem with the specific project, or might this be an inherent result of any such attempt?

Over the next few posts on this topic I will be looking at the issue of union catalogs in relation to media archives: What are some of the difficulties involved in establishing one? What other union catalogs have succeeded and what has contributed to their success? Is this an attainable idea or even a good one? And what kinds of solutions exist that archives can apply for internal use at the least, or for positioning themselves for the future? We may or may not gain a clue as to how to design and implement the ultimate union catalog, but we will definitely gain a better understanding of the process and how planning and execution relate to any project within the archive, whether large scale or not.

— Joshua Ranger

Creating Content / Creating Context

Film is the great American medium. When it came along, we were still struggling to attain approval of our literary and cultural production from a withholding Europe. As an epicenter of the creation of the film industry, we were able to develop “languages” and styles that have become a major part of defining what filmic expression is. Among current filmmakers, the documentarian Ken Burns and director Quentin Tarantino could arguably be considered two of the greatest distillers of American culture within this medium, even though they take such radically different stylistic approaches. While their base approach is much the same – the consumption and reworking of archival/cultural materials – their presentational styles reflect the differences in what they are trying to accomplish. Both men work under a system of appropriation. Burns appropriates the actual materials, whereas Tarantino appropriates the aura of the materials — styles, themes, the experience associated with viewing film…

In this clip from Burns’ upcoming documentary The National Parks: America’s Best Idea airing on PBS we see his standard use of archival materials: panning across period images paired with a dramatic reading of some writing from around the same period or a commentator’s gloss on the topic:

Of course, Burns leans on the aura of the materials as well, but he is concerned with the kind of aura we typically associate with the Archive — the sense of uniqueness, of history, of a piece of the past preserved that we grasp at to try and understand but that remains not entirely tangible. Leaving any critiques of this method aside, we can see that one result of his style is the transference of the aura of the archive to his own work. That warm feeling we have towards the historical building blocks of the piece extend to the work as a whole. This is one of the great values of archival materials that more and more filmmakers are relying on — the use of items that often have less expensive licensing fees compared to commercial works but that have an immediate cache of seriousness and high culture.

Compare this then to Tarantino, especially his most recent works which have become less and less homage as their elements of pastiche have increased. Compare this clip from Jackie Brown which recalls 70s heist and exploitation films:

with the preview from Kill Bill that throws together incongruous styles from Kung Fu, Japanese crime, and Anime films (for starters):

The ultimate expression of this manner of appropriation is Grindhouse (with Robert Rodriguez and others), an attempt to recreate a very specific movie-going experience of viewing a B-movie double feature in a run-down theatre, complete with “damaged” film, missing reels, previews, and plenty of gore & sex (though you do have to provide your own broken seats, sticky floors, and disturbing odors).

In the same way Burns does, Tarantino relies on extra-textual meaning to add context/depth to his work. This is a basic tenet of art, but, depending on one’s own proclivities, Tarantino’s approach may be seen as either less significant than Burns’ (it relies on pop culture, not serious culture) or more significant than Burns’ (it relies on low culture, not more canonical historiography).

We could perhaps, then, almost consider Tarantino the more austere Archivist as compared to Burns. In our field, in trying to navigate some of the ideologies adopted from traditional archival theory of paper-based works, we deal daily with the conflict of preservation of the original item versus preservation of only the content. This issue is being pushed to the fore with the increase in the creation and preservation of digital assets. In one approach, part of preserving the original is the idea of preserving the experience — the look, the feel, the great intangible whatsit. Without content we would not have memory or history, but it is often the emotional/experiential connection to the past that drives preservation efforts. There are many reasons to preserve, and many ways to advocate for a collection. Is there a single “stylistic” approach that works?

— Joshua Ranger

Project Outsourcing: Navigating Through The Client/Vendor Relationship To Achieve Your Project Goals

A guide and checklist to help clients successfully work with vendors.

• PROJECT OUTSOURCING (PDF)

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