The Missing Link: Content Indexing, User-Created Metadata, and Improving Scholarly Access to Moving Image Archives

Abstract

The Missing Link:Content Indexing, User-Created Metadata, and Improving Scholarly Access to Moving Image Archives Kevin Andreano (bio) Introduction Throughout history, scholarly interest in moving image archives has rarely extended beyond academics involved in film studies, leaving a wealth of human experience captured on film and video hidden from the more general scholarly community. Taking as its premise the idea that accessible catalogs with comprehensive content descriptions are the key to establishing a link between scholars and moving image archives, this article attempts to illustrate the importance of content description before exploring how content is currently described and how to best capture it in the future. By looking at the limitations of current cataloging practices and speculating on the usefulness of new technology and emerging cataloging methods, such as user-created metadata, this article is intended to foster a better understanding of the need to provide access to audiovisual content, so that it may be seriously considered if moving image archives are to throw open their doors to the scholarly community as they enter the digital age. From the Archives, Much is to Be Offered In her 1994 study of film archives, Keepers of the Frame, Penelope Houston includes one chapter solely devoted to the lack of academic interest in moving image archives.1 The chapter is titled "Of the Scholars, Nothing Is to be Expected," and it provides a brief history of scholarly indifference to film archives, from British documentary filmmaker Sir Arthur Elton's assessment in 1955 that "most British universities have neglected the use of film. . .almost to the point of perversity," to Houston's own evaluation in 1994 that "a historian preparing the biography of some twentieth-century figure" would "certainly not" think to contact a film archive "to see what his subject looked and sounded like."2 Now, more than ten years after Houston's book, it appears that this academic apathy continues to exist. Moving Image Collections (MIC), for example, a Web site being developed to serve both as a directory of moving image archives and as a union catalog of various archive's holdings, states that one of its primary goals is to "integrate moving images into the information mainstream." This is an important task, the MIC mission statement claims, because "moving images have remained isolated from the mainstream as an information resource, rarely cited in research papers. . .or consulted as primary reference sources."3 Archivists have long been frustrated by the low scholarly expectations they are forced to harbor, because they are all too familiar with the rich cultural and historical resources that are sitting idly on archive shelves. As Martin A. Jackson, coeditor of Film and History, wrote in 1973, "the vast holdings of the world's film archives offer to the historian a priceless source material for the study of modern civilization, yet this material has barely been touched by researchers."4 For archivists, the realization that moving images are culturally and historically significant resources is nothing new. 'In 1898, a Polish camera operator named Boleslaw Matuszewski proposed the creation of the first film archive,' reasoning that film can provide a unique form of historical evidence. "The camera [End Page 82] will not perhaps give us the complete history," he wrote, "but at least what it gives us will be incontestable and absolutely true."5 Despite the rise of fiction films, prepackaged documentaries, and edited newsreels that could distort the "incontestability" of the footage, future commentators would continue to point to the value of certain types of films that provided firsthand historical documentation in unique ways. Sir Arthur Elton in 1955, for example, was particularly interested in the straight history offered by newsreel outtake footage, urging film archives to preserve as much of this material as possible.6 Many archives have done exactly that, and authors such as Robert Edwin Herzstein—writing in 1988 that "newsreels and outtakes. . .are of tremendous value and have yet to be exploited by historians"—have attempted to draw attention to the historical value of these collections.7 Meanwhile, in 1973, Martin Jackson saw "the chance of liberating and using. . .countless reels of home movies and private films" as "one of the most intriguing...