Moving Image Collections Research Articles

Film for a purpose: a pictorial introduction

ABSTRACT Created for the Uses of Cinema conference (SSAAANZ, Monash University, November 2018), the video Film for a Purpose (13 minutes, 2018) offers a précis of my research with the ARC Discovery project ‘Utilitarian film in Australia 1945-1980'. The video essay ironically deploys certain tropes of the sponsored film - the green screen, the authoritative presenter, the wallto-wall narration, the literal illustration, etc. - in its exposition of the studies cited. An overview of the National Archives of Australia (NAA) where moving image collections of Australian government agencies are collected then drills down to films from the CSIRO (Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organisation) Film Unit. Uses of Cinema then turns to films of the Australian labour movement through the lens of Tom Zubrycki's controversial documentary film history of the Australian trade union movement, Amongst Equals (1986-1991). Each case study brings to light certain problems pertinent to the broader category: the ‘utilitarian film', in the Australian context. Finally a fourth research paper, completed after 2018, examines the surveillance image and its uses in political propaganda and investigative documentary. This ‘pictorial introduction' lightly annotates a selection of freeze frames from the film, explicating aspects of their ‘screen design’ and treatment.

Paul Spehr (1931–2019)

Paul Spehr (1931–2019) Mike Mashon (bio), Geo Willeman (bio), Arlene Balkansky (bio), Dan Streible (bio), and Mark Williams (bio) the Basic facts of Paul's career map the evolution of film archiving. He arrived at the Library of Congress in 1958 as the first employee hired as a full-time film preservationist and spent the next thirty-five years turning a barely organized collection into a division founded on archival principles—many of which Paul developed—and dedicated to the preservation of America's unmatched cinematic and televisual heritage. Paul was an indefatigable advocate for motion picture acquisition and preservation to a senior management that took some convincing; there's no question that the Library's moving image collections would be severely impoverished if not for his leadership. Paul had retired from the Library by the time I arrived as moving image curator in 1998, but he was still very much an active presence. He proved a wise and patient teacher, a seemingly bottomless source of information about W. K. L. Dickson and American Mutoscope and Biograph. But, more importantly, he knew so much about the nature of our holdings and how they evolved within the larger context of the Library as a national collection. His grasp of institutional history was invaluable, his generosity of spirit inspiring, and his legacy enduring. —Mike Mashon, Moving Image Section Head, Library of Congress ________ one of the things I remember best about Paul was that he treated us like colleagues, even when we were but lowly vault collection attendants at Wright–Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio—in nitrate vaults that Paul helped identify and secure for the Library. Early on in my career, Paul asked me to accompany him on a trip to Toledo, Ohio, to inspect a collection of nitrate. Over the three-plus-hour drive, we had plenty of time to get to know each other, and that trip set our relationship for the next thirty years. Once he retired, I got to see and interact with Paul even more through emails and phone calls and in person at film festivals. At one of them, I mentioned a story I had heard about young employees literally hiding nitrate copyright prints at a time when the Library was replacing them with 16mm safety reductions. Afterward, Paul came up to me and told me he was the one who did it. That alone makes him a major archival hero in my mind. —Geo. Willeman, Nitrate Vault Manager, Library of Congress ________ i am one of many who would not have had a career in moving image archives without Paul. He generously met with me while I was still an undergraduate. His enthusiasm inspired me to get a graduate degree, and after joining the Library's Motion Picture Section in 1978, I was afforded multiple opportunities to expand my knowledge of film and television archives. Paul encouraged staff members at all levels to [End Page 301] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Paul Spehr illuminated, Orphans 2016, LOC Culpeper. Photograph courtesy of New York University Cinema Studies. attend the D.C. meetings of the Film Archives Advisory Committee and the Television Archives Advisory Committee (FAAC/TAAC), precursors to AMIA. I will always be grateful for his personal kindness and support. —Arlene Balkansky, former Moving Image Cataloger, Library of Congress ________ steeped in knowledge about film history, Paul was ever generous about sharing what he knew or where to look for answers. Whether at the many conferences and festivals he frequented or over social media, he would speak (always quietly and with modesty) about collections and films other experts had overlooked. When people inquired further, Paul would tell more and go so far as to share copies of primary sources he had been filing away for many years. His insights guided my research for three decades. When I visited the Library of Congress as a researcher in the early 1990s, he saw I was looking at a nineteenth-century illustration republished in a recent book. He introduced himself and offered historical context about the image that saved me from misunderstanding what I was studying. As the Orphan Film Symposium...

Moving Image User-Generated Description

This article explores temporal influences on compressive social tagging generation for archival moving image materials through a quasi-experimental study. Forty participants tagged the same video segmented into differing lengths. Analysis of the resulting data found the average number of user-generated tags is influenced by the length of the video within moving image collections. Specifically, the average tagging rate for a short video was higher than its lengthier counterpart.

Guest Editors' Foreword: Digital Humanities and/in Film Archives

Guest Editors' Foreword:Digital Humanities and/in Film archives Dimitrios Latsis (bio) and Grazia Ingravalle (bio) The continuous redefinition of the role and purview of archivists and curators of moving image media has been driven, in no small measure, by the development of digital tools and networks. To better understand this shift and start mapping its current impact on archives and film preservation, this special issue of The Moving Image assembles perspectives from leading curators, archivists, academics, and digital humanists who have developed innovative platforms to disseminate the work done in moving image archival collections. They provide new tools and resources for both research and pedagogy, share best practices, discuss opportunities for collaboration, and address challenges from leading digital humanities (DH) projects in the audiovisual archival field. Most of these projects are still in progress, so the reader will find that this collection of feature articles and Forum pieces signals the current developing status—or "iterative" nature, to quote Charles Tepperman—of the digital humanities. The contributions compellingly reflect the state of the field, while still leaving open critical questions for future discussion. One such question is certainly whether DH methodologies and tools advance new epistemologies and practices for research in film and media studies and in archival moving image collections. While our contributors reject the idea that by incorporating (partially) automated tasks, DH methodologies lend increased scientific credibility to media analyses and histories, they all highlight the heuristic value of its applications. As the articles in this special issue emphasize, many of the tasks involved in DH projects (creating a database, segmenting a film sequence, annotating, selecting variables, etc.) in fact force us to interrogate established vocabularies, prompting us [End Page xi] once more to (re)define, for instance, "race film," a film "shot," or an "archival record." The digital humanities, as these examples show, encourage interinstitutional and interdisciplinary collaborations among scholars and archivists, inviting them to open up the results of their work to awareness, criticism, and debate. Particular focus is placed on outreach initiatives that give access and visibility to nonfiction, amateur, and nontheatrical film: programming, platforms for user-contributed content, crowdsourcing, and original ways of annotating, sharing, and cross-referencing time-based media. We also address pedagogy that utilizes primary sources, facilitates (under)graduate research, and encourages broader stakeholders, such as K–12 instruction and local and community-based organizations. Shane O'Sullivan approaches these goals by exploring institutional projects that in the last fifteen years have granted access to British audiovisual archival materials for education. O'Sullivan particularly concentrates on the pioneering work of current British Film Institute (BFI) head of education Paul Gerhardt and the collaboration between the BFI and Kingston University on a pedagogical project teaching students to reuse moving image archive material in video essays. Philipp Dominik Keidl expands a thorough consideration of the exhibition strategies of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne into a broader consideration of what media archaeological thinking and practices can mean outside the purview of academia, specifically as enabled by digital technologies and environments. An expanded and crucially public iteration of media archeology can stand as an equal partner and generator of discourse that leads to more conceptual contributions to film and media history. Liliana Melgar Estrada, Eva Hielscher, Marijn Koolen, Christian Gosvig Olesen, Julia Noordegraaf, and Jaap Blom collaboratively survey different video annotation and editing tools widely used in media studies and production. The authors examine two kinds of video software, ELAN and NVivo, to analyze a sequence from People on Sunday (Robert Siodmak et al., 1930). They assess the advantages and drawbacks of each, along with the larger implications for moving image scholars, professionals, and archivists. What would a digital humanities approach to film colors look like? In answering this question, Barbara Flueckiger reflects on the ERC Advanced Grant FilmColors project at the University of Zurich, an extension of one of the best-known DH projects to deal with film history, the Timeline of Historical Film Colors. With computer-assisted tools, such as video annotation and a database of color patterns from a wide array of films, FilmColors aims to merge quantitative and qualitative approaches to demonstrate what [End Page xii] a...

New life for old bones: moving image collections at the National Archives of Australia

ABSTRACTCinema studies scholarship has recently turned its attention to the ‘utilitarian film’; the industrial, training and ‘data-film’; Rick Prelinger’s ‘vernacular archive’. An Australian study mapping this territory has been initiated. Australia’s largest repository of audio-visual records is the National Archives of Australia (NAA), where a variety of collections derived from Commonwealth agencies (CAs) are housed and preserved. Diminishing resources allocated by governments to collecting institutions in Australia compound the degree of difficulty faced by moving image archives at a time when an exponential growth in digital acquisitions, crisis around the preservation of video-originated archives and citizen’s needs and expectations of access to records, including moving image archives, increases. This article offers an overview of the NAA’s Audio-visual Preservation projects and collections.

The Survival of Experimental Film: A Conversation with Light Cone's Emmanuel Lefrant

Research Article| July 01 2015 The Survival of Experimental Film: A Conversation with Light Cone's Emmanuel Lefrant Scott Hammen Scott Hammen SCOTT HAMMEN is a filmmaker living in Paris, where he works with Light Cone. He recently exhibited his work at VSW and is collaborating with VSW's Curator of Moving Image Collections, artist Tara Nelson, on a new publishing venture about moving image artists. Hammen is a 1975 alumnus of the Visual Studies Workshop MFA program. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (2015) 43 (1-2): 20–23. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2015.43.1-2.20 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Scott Hammen; The Survival of Experimental Film: A Conversation with Light Cone's Emmanuel Lefrant. Afterimage 1 July 2015; 43 (1-2): 20–23. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2015.43.1-2.20 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAfterimage Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2015 Afterimage/Visual Studies Workshop, unless otherwise noted. Reprints require written permission and acknowledgement of previous publication in Afterimage.2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Up from the Depths: Return of the 16 mm Film, or How to Weed Your Film Collection

Moving images are essential resources for teaching and research in higher education. Libraries provide access to these resources in many formats such as U-matic tapes, 16 mm film, VHS, DVD, and streaming video. Changing moving image technologies and preferences of faculty and students present challenges for librarians in managing media collections, as libraries must make difficult decisions about weeding legacy moving image collections. The authors present a case study and practical advice on developing guidelines for collaborative, thoughtful withdrawal of 16 mm films, lessons learned, and scalable recommendations for how libraries and archives can best maintain media collections unique to their campus.

Text as a Tool for Organizing Moving Image Collections

In the rapidly-growing networked environment, it is critical to develop common methods for shot-level and scene-level description of moving image documents, in order to foster discovery and retrieval of these resources worldwide. In this paper, we describe the methodology used and report preliminary results obtained in a project designed to study existing tools for indexing moving images at the shot level. A number of institutions holding moving image collections were recruited as partners, and visits to them were then made to complete a questionnaire and gather other information during a structured interview. Preliminary results show that a variety of tools are used for indexing moving images, and that those institutions which have been able to invest in building good indexing tools over the years have seen the quality of those tools suffer in the wake of cutbacks in resources needed to maintain them.

Conceptual and Lexical Compatibility in Thesauri Used to Describe and Access Moving Image Collections

The term-to-term comparison method was used to identify various types and levels of conceptual equivalence among five controlled vocabularies used for content representation in collections of non-art moving images. It was found that conceptual overlap is high enough to justify the pursuit of research and development work on a common basic indexing and access language that could be used to name categories of persons, objects, events, and relations most frequently depicted in non art moving image collections.Nous avons utilisé la méthode de comparaison terme-à-terme pour identifier divers types de relations et niveaux d’équivalence conceptuelle entre cinq langages documentaires utilisés pour la représentation du contenu dans des collections d’images en mouvement non artistiques. Les résultats de l’exercice démontrent que la compatibilité conceptuelle est suffisamment élevée pour justifier la poursuite des travaux visant le développement d’un langage documentaire commun utilisable pour nommer les catégories de personnes, objets, événements et relations les plus souvent décrits dans les collections d’images en mouvement non artistiques.

Distribution and Consumption Patterns of Archival Moving Images in Online Environments

This study gathers data on how cultural institutions, specifically archives, libraries, and museums, are making archival moving images available online via various distribution methods. The investigator conducted a short survey of 16 individuals responsible for the development of digital archival moving image collections to determine their institution's digitization and distribution activities for moving images. Data gathered indicate that institutions exhibit strong interest in moving image digitization projects and online distribution, yet significant perceived and tangible barriers to digitization and distribution continue to restrict the development of digital projects and programs for archival moving images. Institutions have not yet invested significant resources into serious study of archival moving image uses and users, which practitioners and researchers should address to determine the best methods to improve access to such materials.

Points of Origin: Discovering Ourselves through Access

Points of OriginDiscovering Ourselves through Access Rick Prelinger (bio) Just as librarians promote the use of books, and as teachers defend before the public the value of education, so archivists have as a part of their duty to give stimulus and guidance to the use of archives, and to their use not by the few but by the many. The objective of archival policy in a democratic country cannot be the mere saving of paper; it must be nothing less than the enriching of the complete historical consciousness of the people as a whole. … [T]he archivist is and ought to be concerned with the most distant futures, and less than any other professional man in the country can he afford to be hesitant in defining long-term objectives. —Robert C. Binkley, 1939 Unsaid and Undone So much has been said and written about archival access that another article seems almost superfluous. And yet, as we tiptoe toward opening our collections to a world of ready eyes and eager makers, much remains unsaid and even more undone. As a longtime advocate of broadly expanded access to moving image collections, I continue to be struck by the divergence between our theoretical acceptance of access as a goal and the poor state of access that actually reigns. While expanding access has become a relatively uncontroversial objective, its implementation is roadblocked by constraint, uncertainty, and ambivalence. Archivists labor in a field where critique isn't necessarily tied to remediation. While many archivists, scholars, and moving image users have remarked on the difficulties of archival access, few have moved beyond complaint to advocacy. Quite a number of archivists, librarians, and curators have contributed significantly to an evolving discourse of access (in the moving image field, I must especially note the contributions of emerging archivists and archival students). Regrettably, few innovators hold decision-making positions in their institutions, and breadth of vision does not guarantee change: most archivists lack fiscal authority to fund proverbial "bold, new initiatives." There is little incentive to question rules, traditions, and hierarchies and become advocates for change. Even more disappointing, calls for greater openness all too often elicit defensive responses, which might sound like the following (imaginary) statements, chosen, of course, for polemical effect: We already provide access to our collection! Researchers and scholars are welcome to make an appointment to come in and view a film on the flatbed (as long as a reference print is available); we maintain a regular public screening schedule; and we lend screening prints to other qualified institutions. While archival moving image access encompasses a broad spectrum of modalities, legacy modes of access no longer address the needs of current and future moving image users. In contrast, many museums, libraries, and textual archives are working to develop user-centered access models, in so doing leaving moving image collections far behind.1 Lack of funding, staff, and resources make it impossible for us to mount a digitization project or serve legions of new users. Though this correctly describes the situation most institutions face, it's also a self-fulfilling prophecy [End Page 164] without alternatives. There are, in fact, numerous responses: reallocating internal resources to support user-centered services; coordinating access projects with potential partner institutions; using inexpensive, commodity-based tools and services to expose holdings and enable their use; collaborating with user communities and the public to digitize and contextualize materials; turning the archives into producer and publisher; and many others. Archival ethics and best practices prevent us from providing access to materials that haven't been preserved. Once-well-intentioned restrictions instituted to protect unpreserved physical materials mean much less in an age of infinite digital surrogates. Many archivists have learned that nondestructive copying of unpreserved materials enables vastly expanded access and materially aids in the quest for preservation funding. It is untenable for an archive to maintain a smaller collection of accessible, preserved materials and a larger collection that is inaccessible pending preservation. We can't expose or furnish material without permission from the copyright holders. True, of course, in many cases; unclear or untrue in just as many others. Most moving image archives actually possess significant reserves of potentially unencumbered...

The BFI National Library and film education in a digital age

The British Film Institute has always tried to balance its role as a repository of moving image collections and their associated materials with encouraging their study and understanding. This article looks at the increasing opportunities for providing access to material in educational and library contexts, as well as giving an overview of the library.

A user‐centered functional metadata evaluation of moving image collections

AbstractIn this article, the authors report a series of evaluations of two metadata schemes developed for Moving Image Collections (MIC), an integrated online catalog of moving images. Through two online surveys and one experiment spanning various stages of metadata implementation, the MIC evaluation team explored a user‐centered approach in which the four generic user tasks suggested by IFLA FRBR (International Association of Library Associations Functional Requirement for Bibliographic Records) were embedded in data collection and analyses. Diverse groups of users rated usefulness of individual metadata fields for finding, identifying, selecting, and obtaining moving images. The results demonstrate a consistency across these evaluations with respect to (a) identification of a set of useful metadata fields highly rated by target users for each of the FRBR generic tasks, and (b) indication of a significant interaction between MIC metadata fields and the FRBR generic tasks. The findings provide timely feedback for the MIC implementation specifically, and valuable suggestions to other similar metadata application settings in general. They also suggest the feasibility of using the four IFLA FRBR generic tasks as a framework for user‐centered functional metadata evaluations.

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

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...

Integrating MPEG‐7 into the Moving Image Collections portal

AbstractThis article discusses the implementation of MPEG‐7 within the Moving Image Collections (MIC) portal. MIC is a union catalog of the world's moving images, as well as a portal to information on the care, management, and use of moving images. The MIC Union Catalog utilizes a core registry schema that is designed to map readily to any metadata schema used to describe moving images. The MIC development team was particularly interested in supporting MPEG‐7 for future non textual digital video indexing applications. An MPEG‐7 application profile and Microsoft Access cataloging utility were developed in order to test MPEG‐7 within the MIC Union Catalog; 400 science digital videos in the Research Channel collection were cataloged in MPEG‐7. The MPEG‐7 records were mapped to MIC and ingested. Draft MPEG‐7 to MIC and MIC to MPEG‐7 maps were developed and are available at the MIC Web site. MPEG‐7 records are available for viewing for any record in the MIC database via a collections explore search within the Archivists' portal. The MPEG‐7 cataloging utility may be downloaded from the MIC project Web site (Moving Image Collections. MIC Cataloging Utility. http://gondolin.rutgers.edu/MIC/text/how/cataloging utility.htm). This article also discusses issues with MPEG‐7 as a descriptive metadata schema, as well as mapping and implementation issues identified in the project.

The Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center

The Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center Mike Mashon (bio) Seventy-five miles southwest of Washington, D.C., outside the town of Culpeper, Virginia, on a site once occupied by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, a revolution in audiovisual preservation and access is taking shape. A building that once held sufficient monetary reserves to restart the American economy east of the Mississippi River in event of a nuclear holocaust now contains the more than 5 million film, video, and audio items in the collections of the Library of Congress. Next to it, a state-of-the-art conservation center will open in spring 2007, broad in scope, bristling with innovation, representing a paradigm shift in the way archives preserve moving image and recorded sound material and deliver them to patrons around the globe. Together with 124 vaults designed to house the Library's 130 million feet of nitrate film, the complex is known as the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center (NAVCC). Funded primarily by the Packard Humanities Institute, the 415,000 square foot complex will contain not only state-of-the-art preservation laboratories but also space for the Library's moving image and recorded sound processing staff, an acoustically perfect critical listening room, and a 200-seat theater capable of projecting nitrate film. Most strikingly, the NAVCC will usher in a complete redesign of the way the Library acquires and preserves film, video, and recorded sound, particularly in the [End Page 140] digital domain. The Library has already made the transition to file-based digital preservation of sound, and in Culpeper will do the same for videotape, using a high throughput, automated robotic transfer system. For now, large-scale digitization of film will wait until the technology matures and costs come down. Still, the Library remains committed to film-to-film preservation—especially for its nitrate holdings—for the long term. But what does all this mean for researchers? The main access point for patrons will remain on Capitol Hill in the Library's Madison Building, and researchers will still need to request items two weeks in advance. The major difference will be in delivery of content. For the near term, film will be delivered from Culpeper to Washington, but patrons wishing to see a video or listen to recorded sound will access digital files created at the NAVCC, but streamed to Capitol Hill via fiber optic lines. In a very real sense, researcher demand will drive preservation priorities. The increased capabilities and capacities of the NAVCC—an estimated 5-plus million gigabytes of digital information will be produced annually—means that access to collections can be increased exponentially beyond the confines of the reading room. The Library is studying ways to make copyrighted content available to desktops worldwide, but even as that study continues, plans are being made to provide thousands of hours of restriction-free moving image content in ways that are useful for researchers, including the use of folksonomies and other user-generated metadata, allowing users to tag files with their own descriptions (à la YouTube, etc.). Coupled with aggressive plans to digitize moving image-related microfilm and periodicals, the NAVCC promises to open up the Library's collections in unprecedented ways. The NAVCC will also be home to the Moving Image Collections (MIC) project, which documents moving image collections around the world through a catalog of titles and directory of repositories, providing a window to the world's moving image collections for discovery, access, and preservation. This resource—a union catalog of moving images—is phenomenally useful for scholars, archivists, and even causal users, and it will continue to grow in depth and breadth in the coming years. Further, the NAVCC will be, in the words of David Francis, former Chief of the Library's Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division, "a center of excellence where scholars, visiting archive professionals, and students from graduate courses in moving image and recorded sound archiving can meet to consider the curatorial, technical and ethical issues associated with audiovisual preservation and access."1 All the technological innovation employed to preserve moving images, recorded sound, and born digital content like podcasts and video games, is used for...

Archives and Access in the 21st Century

Some 30 years ago moving image began migrating from the fringes of media culture towards the center. For some (but not all) collections, mainstreaming has brought wealth and fame, visibility and allure. Scholarly work built on the archival record is increasing, mass media is redolent with archival images and sounds, and a growing number of archives fans regard once-obscure repositories as exciting, relevant, and culturally hip institutions. But while the archival hour may be at hand, the sustainability and survival of archival institutions are far from certain. The reasons are both extrinsic and intrinsic to archives. Many institutions sequester their holdings behind walls of copyright, policy, or indifference, rendering them inaccessible to many. Quick Web searches are replacing deep archival research, and most archival materials are not online. Copyright maximalism, a reluctance to embrace technology, and resistance to providing public access are marginalizing moving image at the very moment when they might otherwise be addressing massive new audiences and building new constituencies. What is it about moving images that problematizes archival practice? How can we turn risks into opportunities in the twenty-first century archives? How can archivists embrace new public roles and put the stereotype of the reclusive, dustcovered repository to rest? And how can scholars, the canonical beneficiaries of archives, help them to reconcile legacy practices and new cultural functions? While the classical moving image may have theoretically accepted the indivisibility of its two primary missions, preservation and access, archivists tended to privilege preservation. This was perfectly logical. For moving image archives, access has always been a sticky door. Free and open access was potentially against the law (for certain copyrighted materials) and insupportably expensive (when staffing was short, budgets inadequate, or equipment lacking). Allowing access to formerly private collections contravened contracts (if donor restrictions governed). Many moving image held materials covertly, without explicit authorization, again making access to materials risky. In fact, excepting a few exemplary institutions, access to most moving image collections is still minimal. As many scholars know, archival access requires viewing a film on the premises, using special flatbed editing tables on which fast forward has been disabled, with five days' notice to pull material. Access is often restricted

MIC metadata strategies: Thinking beyond asset management

This paper examines the metadata strategies of Moving Image Collections (MIC), a collaboration of the Library of Congress and the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA). MIC offers a union catalog, archive directory and informational resources about moving images and their preservation, through a portal structure delivering customized information to diverse constituencies. The paper discusses three key principles underlying MIC's strategy and how they have been applied to meet the respective missions of the two co-sponsors. The key principles are promotion of standards, acceptance of diversity in collections and schemas, and the need to extend effective metadata use to all repositories. This visionary metadata strategy takes MIC's functionalities beyond asset management. MIC creates a framework for collaborative community building and an R&D platform to explore issues of digital rights management, low-level indexing and the intersection of public and private sector goals, in an effort to advance the Library of Congress mission to preserve and educate.

Audiovisual Archiving and the World of Tomorrow: Explorations into Accreditation and Certification

Audiovisual Archiving and the World of Tomorrow:Explorations into Accreditation and Certification Emily Staresina (bio) Context A profession is a body of people in a learned occupation who agree upon and maintain codified values, ethics, and practices within their field, which in turn safeguard the integrity of the profession. Professionals require a specialized education in which these values, ethics, and practices are taught. Professions require a forum in which these values, ethics, and practices are debated. Thus, professionals compose a professional community, but they also give back to the community. As such, professions are widely recognized by the general public, the government, and the private sector, who all hold the professions accountable for the actions of all their practitioners. The presence of accountability—both internally and externally—is integral to a profession, as it indicates that a profession has a function in and a responsibility to society. Among the common elements that inform a profession are work autonomy; a specialized core body of knowledge, ethics, principles, and values defined and upheld by committed individuals and organizations; a body of literature; and control of a job market. In order to synthesize all these elements, there must exist a standardized method of educating a profession's practitioners. The type of education may vary from internships, workshops, individual courses, and long-distance training to college diplomas, advanced university degrees, examinations, and certifications. In most professions, such as law, medicine, and accounting, the successful completion of one or a combination of these options is required before a practitioner may legally commence working. Standardized education is used as a tool to ensure that would-be practitioners share the essential background knowledge and skill sets to perform their job according to a set of established standards. One method of standardizing education is through the process of accrediting professional or specialized graduate-level education. Accreditation refers to the recognition process whereby a governing body—usually part of an existing association—outlines standards in graduate education and has the power to accredit programs that meet established criteria. A second method of standardizing education is through certification, whereby an individual is recognized as possessing defined skills and knowledge to perform required tasks in accordance with minimum standards set by one or several governing bodies or institutions. It has been more than one hundred years since Boleslaw Matuszewski wrote his futuristic text "A New Source of History" and the first paper prints of films were deposited in the Library of Congress. In terms of being a professional field, however, audiovisual archiving has yet to mature. One factor contributing to this state of affairs is that audiovisual archiving has lacked a formalized method of educating [End Page 102] its practitioners. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, such education was largely a matter of on-the-job training supplemented by occasional workshops and seminars.2 During this period, there were limited forums for discussion outside of a handful of institutions, such as the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF), and professional literature was scant. There existed neither codified values nor standards by which the community of audiovisual archivists could work or be identified. The 1998 UNESCO publication Philosophy of Audiovisual Archiving: Principles and Practices was one of the first attempts to codify values and standards within the audiovisual field. Its author, Ray Edmondson, observed that the field and its practitioners lacked a clear identity and recognition within the collecting professions, the government, the audiovisual industries, and the public as a whole. He noted that a lack of synthesized values, ethics, principles, and perceptions created a vacuum at the profession's core.3 Today, however, the outlook is less bleak. Best practices and standards in every aspect of the field—from preservation to cataloging to access—are beginning to emerge. The Moving Image Collections (MIC) initiative is an example of organizations and individuals both within the audiovisual archiving field and in related fields creating and sharing cataloging and access standards. Opportunities for community discussions and lobbying have increased with the proliferation of professional associations such as the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA), the International Federation of Television Archives (FIAT), the International Association of Sound Archives (IASA), and the Audiovisual Archiving Philosophy Interest Network...

A Resource Guide to Travel Film Repositories

Travel films, broadly defined, exist in most moving image collections. Theatrical shorts and features, television series, tourism promotion films, professional and amateur lecture films, expeditionary films and footage, unedited amateur footage are all held by regional and government archives, museums, historical societies, universities, libraries, commercial footage houses, and film distributors. The following is intended to be an annotated guide to a representative set of repositories in North America containing significant amounts of travel film material.