Audiovisual Archives Research Articles

Replicating Digital Audiovisual Archives in the Cloud

Non-alphanumeric characters in filenames and filepaths can lead to unintended consequences in digital preservation. The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation Archive conducted simple tests to investigate peculiarities related to this issue that surfaced when preserving their audiovisual assets. This case study resulted in a list of problematic, albeit commonly used, non-alphanumeric characters. It also uncovered significant implications for using proprietary cloud replication software as part of digital preservation workflows.

Историческая реальность и политическая эстетика после Жака Дерриды и Бернара Стиглера

The article aims at showing how far the technologies of audiovisual registration affect not only the ontology of images but also our sense of realism in politics and history. As argue Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, historical events have become "tele-events" after the birth of these technologies. Our handling with images has changed accordingly. As argues Pietro Montani, we no longer consider them as "copies" of real objects but rather as "occasions" for initiating processes of "validation" of history. Hannah Arendt's opposition between the ancient concept of history being based on praxis and the modern concept of history as "fabrication" (poiesis) of the humankind must be therefore reconsidered. History is rather the negotiation between these two attitudes (praxis and poiesis): cinema might be one of the exemplary sources of this negotiation, as epitomized by the documentary work in the audiovisual archives conducted by Esfir Shub (1927) and Harun Farocki (1992). Representation (Louis Martin) becomes thus a dynamical power of imagination dealing with historical and political reality; consequently, the "ideal spectator", just as the "ideal reader" for novels (Umberto Eco), is charged with a new task of actualizing the sense of images with regard to their historical and political references.

Ren Ellis Neyra, The Cry of the Senses: Listening to Latinx and Caribbean Poetics

Reviewed by: The Cry of the Senses: Listening to Latinx and Caribbean Poetics by Ren Ellis Neyra Pamela Zamora Quesada (bio) Ren Ellis Neyra, The Cry of the Senses: Listening to Latinx and Caribbean Poetics. Duke University Press, 2020. Pp. 222. The Cry of the Senses: Listening to Latinx and Caribbean Poetics offers a compelling elaboration of poetics through a Latinx, Caribbean, and African diasporic archive. In terms of methodology, despite the title's focus on listening, Ren Ellis Neyra does not position "sound" as the most well-suited sense for critical analysis. Instead, they call for attuning to synesthesia "that erupt[s] from what was there before the US, and from places beyond and besides US regimes of representation" (xvi). These places are the territory of Puerto Rico and the Sonoran Desert in Arizona. Each chapter shows how, by attending to Black, Latinx, and queer sonic audiovisual archives—namely, films, performances, music, literary texts, and a court case transcript—it is possible to embody more ethical solidarities within Latinx and Caribbean realities. Following Édouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation (1997), the introduction elaborates upon the paradigm of the cry as an inarticulate sound evoking unruliness (18). This sonic unruliness is demonstrated through the analysis of Nude Laughing, a performance by the Mexican American border artist Xandra Ibarra, and the concert of the Afro Puerto Rican group Macha Colón y los Okapi. Particularly illuminating in this regard is Ellis Neyra's reading of Ibarra's retching or laugh, which comes to represent the unruly sound of the Caribbean that rejects white gendered mandates and insists on possibilities of alternative modes of sense and being. Continuing with the analysis of performance, the first chapter addresses multisensorial listening as a variation of close reading. Ellis Neyra defines "unruly audition" as a mode of listening that derives from the excessive pleasure stimulated by salsa, in this case, a listening practice that disrupts market expectations placed on salsa dancers' bodies (31). For instance, Ellis Neyra investigates the riot that ended a Fania All-Stars concert at Yankee Stadium in 1973. Their reading of the riot suggests that an excessive pleasure engendered by salsa exceeded the expected behavior of the audience, troubling the commodification of the musicians and the listeners' status as consumers (35). Refusals of American sovereignty are at the core of the second chapter. Chapter 2 begins by analyzing Lady, a character in Nuyorican playwright Pedro Pietri's The Masses Are Asses (2003), who is held captive in a toilet room by another [End Page 109] character, Gentleman. Lady, a farcical metonymy of Puerto Rico's political status (66), does not contest her subjugated position by verbally confronting her captor, but rather through excretory sounds. Ellis Neyra then reads Lady's refusal alongside a real-life refusal: that of Marie Haydée Beltrán Torres, "Puerto-and Chicago-Rican" member of the political group Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN) (56), who declined to engage in court proceedings related to her part in the bombing of US infrastructure. Insisting on her incarcerated condition (referring, by extension, to the Puerto Rican colonial situation), she declares the trial is "illegal from her (collective) anticolonial position" (85). Lady and Beltrán Torres exercise agency that "does not restore narratives of 'self-possession' and individuation" (89). Thus, the chapter claims that their sonic performances resist "the patriarchalization of female gender as white, properly domesticated, and in existence for the increase of white individuated holdings on being" (88). The third chapter theorizes the concept of "sensorial errancy" in relation to the films of Puerto Rican filmmaker Beatriz Santiago Muñoz. For Ellis Neyra, each film recreates an escape of the touristic and military gaze of municipalities Ceiba, Culebra, and Vieques. This escape occurs by way of the chapter's anchoring concept of sensorial errancy, which refers to the displaced centrality of "white humanist narrative and its antiblack hierarchy of the senses," which make space for an alternative Puerto Rican history, still unknown and therefore only imagined (109). Sensorial errancy sonically orients viewers to images and sounds within an opaque relationship that requires an attentive and slow apprehension. For instance, in Otros usos (2014) Santiago Muñoz...

Resource Management and Optimization Method of Music Audio-Visual Archives under the Background of Big Data

With the development of music and video, music and video management has been in a relatively backward state. This study uses the logistic regression algorithm based on sigmoid functions to analyze and process the music audio-visual library of a music software and establishes the logistic regression dynamic model, which provides a scientific research method for this complex system. The LPC characteristic coefficient is extracted, and then the logistic regression model of music audio-visual archives resources is established. After completing the model, this study obtains the logistic regression model through a series of experiments, which effectively optimizes the management of music audio-visual archives. The specific experimental conclusions are as follows: through genre classification and emotion classification, users can search more music audio-visual archives resources. The comparison shows that the recommendation effect after filtering by the logistic regression model is better than that of the nonstandard collaborative filtering recommendation system. Finally, after practical applications, it is concluded that the model based on the logistic regression algorithm has made a good optimization conclusion for the resource management of music audio-visual archives.

Diverse Perspective of the Shared History

This paper discusses how the interactive documentary A Global Guide to the First World War (Francesca Panetta, 2014) effectively integrates interactive technology with historical narratives of the war through a three-way collaboration between news organizations, historians and digital materials from the Imperial War Museum from the perspective of transnational shared history. The paper argues that the different images, videos, news reports and audio clips reflect diverse aspects of common historical themes in the documentary. First, in its seven video chapters, the museum's audiovisual archive covers many countries, and audiences can watch videos related to the WWI alongside historians' commentaries that explain how different nations fought in the war; second, the interactive part is based on an elaborate digital world map, and users can view audio clips, photocopied newspapers and other materials of the war under various web interaction options, and all of the above can be accessed in multiple languages. The natural and direct feeling brought to audiences is the understanding of the WWI experienced by different peoples and countries with a global perspective, instead of the traditional single narrative perspective. Thus, the documentary is a testimony to the shared history of the war. I suggest that the shared historical events and interactive technology make it easier for viewers from different cultural backgrounds to understand this work, and trigger a wide range of historical resonance. Visual media has always led people to leave events in their memories that they did not experience. Although most viewers did not personally experience WWI, historians' commentaries, museums' audiovisual histories and the Guardian's authentic old stories give us credible evidence of the past. The traumatic memories that the images bring to the audiences create an effect of sympathy for the pain of war and the responsibility to fight against it, which transcends racial and national identification. However, this transnational empathy is quite limited. The reason is that the documentary employs an official authoritative narrative strategy rather than the perspective of the individual. It somehow creates a sense of alienation for the viewers, who realize that these are collages of archival records rather than a kind of historical memory closely related to themselves.

The Attempt to Be Here Now: “Storying” Time through a Virtual Audiovisual Archive

This article explores how conceptions of time are visualised and “storied” in the collaborative photography and video project Hemelliggaam or the Attempt to Be Here Now by Cape Town-based artists Tommaso Fiscaletti and Nic Grobler. Hemelliggaam is a digital audiovisual archive of photography and video installations “exploring the existential aspects of the human–environment– astronomy relationship” (https://hemelliggaam.squarespace.com/about). Through analysing a selection of photographs and videos, my investigation attempts to unravel the human–environment–astronomy relationship as it plays out in various narratives in the virtual archive. Combining representations of astronomic sites, such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project in Carnarvon, with fragments of Afrikaans author Jan Rabie’s mid-century sci-fi novels, the archive seeks to visualise the multifaceted complexity of human engagements with time. I argue that Hemelliggaam, as an audiovisual archive that contextualises time through geology, astronomy, mythology, and science fiction, should be recognised as a project visualising the overlapping of different timescales. The article contextualises Hemelliggaam in contemporary discourses of the Anthropocene, specifically Dipesh Chakrabarty’s idea that a critical framing of the topic needs to recognise the differences between human- historical time and geological-planetary time. By examining the “storying” of overlapped timescales, I suggest that an interdisciplinary approach acknowledging the contributions of both the sciences and the humanities to meaning-making is increasingly relevant to our age of planetary crisis.

Hip Hop Naturalism: A Poetics of Afro-pessimism

This article examines the cross-discursive constellation of hip hop studies, ecocriticism, Black Studies, and literary studies. It proposes the notion of “hip hop naturalism” to come to terms with the way in which current U.S.-American rappers express their social ecologies. Taking its cue from scholars such as Imani Perry, Gregory Phipps, and Kecia Driver Thompson, the article argues for the relevance of literary naturalism in contemporary forms of cultural expression: not merely in the audiovisual archives of TV or film, but in hip hop lyricism. Greve scrutinizes how rap has dealt with themes of social heredity, cultural ecology, and structural racial violence by using similar or even identical diction to that of turn-of-the-twentieth-century American literary naturalists. Furthermore, juxtaposing the essentializing aspects of post-Darwinian discourse with those of Afro-pessimism, the article ultimately argues that what Darwinism was to authors like Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, and Frank Norris, Afro-pessimist discourse is to major representatives of contemporary rap, including Mobb Deep, Danny Brown, Earl Sweatshirt, and Kendrick Lamar. The writings of Frank Wilderson III and other scholars within current Black Studies thus figure as a social-philosophical grounding on which the given lyricist might map his or her own take on the lived experience of the black individual in contemporaneity. While racial inequality has always been a central notion within hip hop literature and culture, it is this naturalist bent that renders possible a more thoroughly ecocritical reading of how rap songs both underscore and subvert, with critical defiance, the systemic naturalization of black life as inferior.

Mapping audiovisual content providers and resources in Greece

In Greece, there are many audiovisual resources available on the Internet that interest scientists and the general public. Although freely available, finding such resources often becomes a challenging task, because they are hosted on scattered websites and in different types/formats. These websites usually offer limited search options; at the same time, there is no aggregation service for audiovisual resources, nor a national registry for such content. To meet this need, the Open AudioVisual Archives project was launched and the first step in its development is to create a dataset with open access audiovisual material. The current research creates such a dataset by applying specific selection criteria in terms of copyright and content, form/use and process/technical characteristics. The results reported in this paper show that libraries, archives, museums, universities, mass media organizations, governmental and non-governmental organizations are the main types of providers, but the vast majority of resources are open courses offered by universities under the “Creative Commons” license. Providers have significant differences in terms of their collection management capabilities. Most of them do not own any kind of publishing infrastructure and use commercial streaming services, such as YouTube. In terms of metadata policy, most of the providers use application profiles instead of international metadata schemas.

Business models for the digital transformation of audiovisual archives

PurposeThis study contributes to the understanding of how cultural organizations are using digital technologies to redesign their business models and enable sustainable and impactful audiovisual digital archives.Design/methodology/approachAn inductive multiple case research design was used. Five cases of audiovisual digital archives of independent films were selected. Data collected was based on desk research, onsite visits, interviews with top managers responsible for the digitalization of some of the archives and experimentation with the services provided. Data was collected and analyzed based on a theoretical framework defined from the literature for business models of cultural organizations.FindingsThe archives analyzed faced the challenge of aligning the commercial viability with a mission of making content available to increase cultural knowledge. A sustainable business model may be achieved by using different revenue models, while guaranteeing to offer a value proposition carefully aligned with stakeholders' expectations. Moreover, an impactful business model, i.e. a business model that enhances the creation of cultural value for customers and reaches wider audiences, requires careful audience management and the use of data analysis about audience behavior to adjust the offering. Finally, the business model must consider the resources, activities and infrastructure that ensure critical capabilities for the business and must be designed to ensure financial resilience of the organization.Originality/valueThis study contributes with a holistic analysis of business models for the digital transformation of cultural organizations, detailing alternative configurations for the most relevant components of a digital business model for audiovisual archives.

Detection and Extraction of Faces and Text Lower Third Techniques for an Audiovisual Archive System using Machine Learning

As part of the audiovisual archive digitization project, which has become a complex field that requires human and material resources, and its automation and optimization have so far represented a center of interest for researchers and media manufacturers, in particular those linked to the integration of artificial intelligence tools in the industry, an elaborate work for the development of an optical character and face recognition model, to digitize the tasks of audiovisual archivist from the manuscript method in automation, from a TV news video. In this article, an approach to develop an example of lower third in Arabic language and facial detection and recognition for news presenter that provide accurate classification results as well as the presentation of different methods and algorithms for Arabic characters. Many studies have been presented in this area, however a satisfactory classification accuracy is yet to be achieved. The comparative state-of-the-art results adopt the latest approaches to study face recognition or OCR, but this model supports both at the same time. it will present the context of realization, the method proposed to extract the texts in the video, using machine learning, about the specificity of the Arabic language, and finally the reasons that govern the decisions taken in the steps of realization. The best results from this approach in real project at the media station was 90.60%. The dataset collected via presenters images and the character dataset via the Pytesseract library.

Bagaimana Menulis Biografi Audiovisual Poststrukturalis?

Poststructuralist audiovisual biography is written using a poststructuralist historical approach and audiovisual archives. This study presents a new method in writing concise and concise biographies for the purpose of making papers and publication articles. The problem is focused on how the writing technique is? Like poststructuralist history, this biography model departs from the actor's present situation in the past. The goal is to explore the actor’s experience that brought him to where he is now. The actor’s successness or failureness today depend on the capital (resources) he has. Are these resources in accordance with the profession? Resources are formed from habits that have undergone internalization to form habits as a guide for actors in thinking and acting when dealing with social reality. Considering this biography model is relatively unknown to academics and history students in genera. This study also discusses the method to write biography as well as the theory that can be used as a basis for thinking. Thus, Bourdieu's generative structural theory is considered very relevant to be used.

Архівування аудіовізуальної спадщини у Великій Британії: історичні традиції та сучасна практика (закінчення)

The aim of the article is to describe the changes in the development of audiovisual heritage archiving in the UK through the prism of forming a network of regional audiovisual archives, outline the main directions and summarize the results of the NGO Film Archives UK (FAUK), its contribution to archiving and audio national level. The research methodology is based on the principles of historicism and objectivity, systemic and interdisciplinary approaches, application of a system of scientifi c methods: theoretical (analysis, synthesis, etc.), empirical (descriptive), comparative, retrospective, chronological and morphological analysis (audiovisual heritage in some centers of its storage). The scientifi c novelty of the study is to reveal the features of the British model of archiving audiovisual heritage at the regional level. The history of formation of a number of regional audiovisual archives in Great Britain is considered, their documentary collections are investigated. Archival initiatives aimed at providing and updating audiovisual collections are summarized. The results of the non-governmental organization Film Archives UK (FAUK) are represented, its contribution to the formation of national policy in the fi eld of audiovisual archiving and the development of cooperation in this fi eld at the national level. Conclusions. The UK’s audiovisual archives, which bring together national and regional collections, are an important part of the world’s audiovisual heritage; their scope, role and importance will inevitably increase with the development of digital and audiovisual technologies. The unprecedented impact of digitization on the fi eld of audiovisual archiving points to the need for transformation and increasing challenges facing archives. This requires interaction and partnership between the country’s audiovisual archives. An important role in this is played by the non-governmental organization Film Archives UK (FAUK), which is an institutional platform for coordinating actions aimed at developing the network of British audiovisual archives and shaping national policy in the fi eld of audiovisual archiving.

Audio-visual heritage preservation and the changing dynamics of Ghana’s historical film archives

ABSTRACT Current discourse on restitution and repatriation of Africa’s cultural heritage from Europe often eschews the large quantum of audio-visual materials kept in European archives. However, nation state sovereignty issues and concerns over easy access to film archives have attracted some level of scholarly attention, especially focussing on questions of ownership and its ramifications. From a historical perspective, this article draws attention to storage and preservation practices of Ghana’s audio-visual archives and suggests that current practices impede greatly on public access to film materials. Emphasis is placed on post- independent Ghanaian films, produced by the Ghana Film Industry Corporation and currently stored with a UK laboratory. rely on data from correspondence between the government of Ghana and storage organizations as well as interviews with key actors within the Ghana film industry to posit that in spite of debates in favour of digitization as the solution to access, the technology must be adopted cautiously where issues of ownership, copyright and the place of the tangible materials take centre stage beyond the digitization process for a sustainable access to Ghana’s archived audio-visual materials.

Comparative Search in Digital Newspaper and Audiovisual Archives: Six Methodological Issues and Some Practical Solutions

Comparative Search in Digital Newspaper and Audiovisual Archives: Six Methodological Issues and Some Practical Solutions

Towards Immersive Generosity: The Need for a Novel Framework to Explore Large Audiovisual Archives through Embodied Experiences in Immersive Environments

Abstract This paper proposes an innovative framework to explore large audiovisual archives using Immersive Environments to place users inside a dataset and create an embodied experience. It starts by outlining the need for such a novel interface to meet the needs of archival scholars and the GLAM sector, and discusses issues in the current modes of access, mostly restrained to traditional information retrieval systems based on metadata. The paper presents the concept of “generous interfaces” as a preliminary approach to address these issues, and argues some of the key reasons why employing Immersive Visual Storytelling might benefit such frameworks. The theory of embodiment is leveraged to justify this claim, showing how a more embodied understanding of a collection can result in a stronger engagement for the public. By placing users as actors in the experience rather than mere spectators, the emergence of narrative is driven by their interactions, with benefits in terms of engagement with the public and understanding of the cultural component. The framework we propose is applied to two existing installations to analyze them in-depth and critique them, highlighting the key directions to pursue for further development.

When ‘Seeing Was Believing’

Focusing on the pivotal period of 1919–23 and the large-scale humanitarian responses in Central and Eastern Europe, this paper discusses the development of advocacy in the movies made by organizations like the ICRC, Save the Children Fund or American Relief Administration. While aid agencies observed and competed with each other for visibility, humanitarian cinema shaped visual advocacy, grounded in the idea that ‘seeing is believing’. Exploring the fragmented audiovisual archives, as well as magazines and promotional material, this paper explores the testimonial function of humanitarian films in the 1920s. It first shows that the immediacy of the cinema technology increased the immersive and affective experience of the viewers by using forensic evidence and images of the body in pain. It then analyses how these films compelled audiences to witness suffering and act through persuasion, suggestion, and emotions. Finally, it inquires into the use of eyewitness images and first-hand accounts during the screenings, to show how these movies operated within larger regimes of visibility, while making claims on behalf of distant beneficiaries.

Preservation of audio-visual archives in Zambia

Audio-visual records and archives constitute a fundamental heritage that satisfies multiple needs, including education, training, research and entertainment. As such, there is a need to appropriately preserve and conserve them so they can be accessed for as long as they are needed. In spite of their significant role in safeguarding cultural heritage, audio-visual records and archives, are often neglected and accorded less attention than paper-based records, especially in developing countries. Hence, there is a risk of losing information held in audio-visual form. That is why this study looked at how the National Archives of Zambia (NAZ) and the Zambia National Broadcasting Corporation (ZNBC) preserve audio-visual materials to ensure long-term accessibility of the information. The study investigated the types of audio-visual collections held, the storage equipment used, measures put in place to ensure long-term accessibility of audio-visual materials, the disaster preparedness plans in place to safeguard audio-visual archives and the major challenges encountered in the preservation of audio-visual materials. The findings of the study revealed that films (microfilm and microfiche), photographs and manuscripts, and video (video tapes) and sound recordings (compact cassette) constitute the biggest audio-visual collection preserved. The equipment used to store audio-visual materials included open shelves, specialised cabinets, electronic database for digitised materials, aisle mobiles and cupboards. The measures taken to ensure the long-term accessibility of audio-visual collection included digitisation and migration of endangered records and archives; fumigation of storage areas; conservation of damaged materials and regulation of temperatures and humidity in the storage areas. The disaster preparedness plans in place mostly covered structure insurance; protection against fire and water by way of installing fire extinguishers; smoke sensors; fire detectors and construction of purpose-built structures. The major challenges faced were financial constraints; technological obsolescence; lack of playback equipment; limited training; lack of strong back-up systems and inadequate storage facilities.

Preservation of audio-visual archives in Zambia

Audio-visual records and archives constitute a fundamental heritage that satisfies multiple needs, including education, training, research and entertainment. As such, there is a need to appropriately preserve and conserve them so they can be accessed for as long as they are needed. In spite of their significant role in safeguarding cultural heritage, audio-visual records and archives, are often neglected and accorded less attention than paper-based records, especially in developing countries. Hence, there is a risk of losing information held in audio-visual form. That is why this study looked at how the National Archives of Zambia (NAZ) and the Zambia National Broadcasting Corporation (ZNBC) preserve audio-visual materials to ensure long-term accessibility of the information. The study investigated the types of audio-visual collections held, the storage equipment used, measures put in place to ensure long-term accessibility of audio-visual materials, the disaster preparedness plans in place to safeguard audio-visual archives and the major challenges encountered in the preservation of audio-visual materials. The findings of the study revealed that films (microfilm and microfiche), photographs and manuscripts, and video (video tapes) and sound recordings (compact cassette) constitute the biggest audio-visual collection preserved. The equipment used to store audio-visual materials included open shelves, specialised cabinets, electronic database for digitised materials, aisle mobiles and cupboards. The measures taken to ensure the long-term accessibility of audio-visual collection included digitisation and migration of endangered records and archives; fumigation of storage areas; conservation of damaged materials and regulation of temperatures and humidity in the storage areas. The disaster preparedness plans in place mostly covered structure insurance; protection against fire and water by way of installing fire extinguishers; smoke sensors; fire detectors and construction of purpose-built structures. The major challenges faced were financial constraints; technological obsolescence; lack of playback equipment; limited training; lack of strong back-up systems and inadequate storage facilities.

The Olympic World Feed Project: Searching, acquiring and preserving the international television signal of the Olympic Games from 1956 to 1988

This paper describes the project carried out by the Olympic Foundation for Culture and Heritage (OFCH) to locate, acquire and preserve all official televised coverage (ie the international television signal) of the Olympic Games broadcast between 1956 and 1988. After providing a general overview of the audiovisual archives of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which are managed and overseen by the OFCH, and outlining the OFCH’s mission and challenges in this respect, the paper discusses how the television broadcasting of the Olympic Games has evolved and the impact of these developments on the race to repatriate and preserve this content. The paper goes on to discuss the Olympic World Feed Project, describing the planning that went into recovering more than 3,000 hours of content missing from the IOC’s archives, as well as the various steps involved and the numerous challenges faced along the way. In particular, the paper provides a case study of the acquisition of the international television signal produced during the XIV Olympic Winter Games — Sarajevo 1984.

Audiovisual Quality Control and Preservation Case Studies from Libraries, Archives, and Museums

Digital audiovisual workflows are complex. They can hinge on a breadth and depth of knowledge that is difficult to find within a single team or institution. The areas of knowledge called on can range from obscure and obsolete audiovisual carriers, to all the components in a digitization workflow chain, as well as new and evolving community resources and digital competencies for discovering errors during the quality control process. While there are many standardized audiovisual workflows, as this paper illustrates, QC work can be difficult even with a high level of training and experience; and problems, when caught, are often resource-intensive to diagnose and address. This paper details six distinct audiovisual case studies in which different digital preservation obstacles that are difficult to qualify, fully understand, and document are discussed; as well as, when possible, their solutions. They are all unique, but also unexceptional: we expect there are comparable situations, perhaps not-yet discovered or addressed in many audiovisual archives. This paper will underscore difficulties, and guide readers through some of the processes -- both formal and informal -- used to further analyze audiovisual file problems. Ultimately, in addition to helping other staff with similar problems, this paper should emphasize to administrators the special resource needs of audiovisual files and the staff responsible for them.