Students from the MA programme Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image participated in the 2014 World Conference of FIAT/IFTA. They share their impressions in a series of blog reports. Aidan Celeste wrote this report.
Herbert Hayduck (ORF) opened the session with a hesitation. He questioned the use of the word exploitation for Digital Access, and proceeded to moderate a discussion led by representatives from EYE Film Institute (Netherlands), RAI (Italy), and the New Zealand Film Archive (New Zealand).
Despite their success in talking about sexy content instead of dreary archives, it was NOA's prospects of a leaner workflow that garnered the most attention midway through the afternoon. As an audio engineer in the late 1990s, Jean-Christophe Kummer, Managing Partner of NOA, observed the unassuming success of the WAV file for sound. In the session he asked us if we, the archivists in the room, can ever adopt the same principles for video. Like the WAV file, his solution is compatible with any Microsoft computer, and manifests itself as the lossless use of Ffv1. This proposal echoed the worry of each case study to follow since the monetary and temporal cost of digital dissemination is often underestimated. Hence, his argument was quickly applauded by each broadcaster but, among a few others, a researcher from INA (France) questioned the speaker about his confidence in the lossless quality of Ffv1.
The Online Exploitation of Archives
Anna Hoetjes from EYE Film Institute handles requests for loans from the collection and its dissemenation. She describes how the request for analogue has not yet died completely but has been complimented with requests for digital content that led to a much wider reach. The main issue is that of delivering high quality material without having to clog up the workflow with cumbersome transcoding. Embracing a wider platform, EYE also shares an online audience with Sound & Vision through openbeelden.nl, a website that makes content available for reuse. Although it is common consensus that curators are no longer hesitant about putting content online, digital access to EYE's full catalogue is still only available by request. Meanwhile, ms. Hoejtes is quite busy reaching out to wider audiences with projects like The Short Film Poule and a Youtube Channel that comes along with a gamut of metadata to transfer without error.
Session moderator Herbert Hayduck during the conference dinner. Photo credit: Oscar Timmers.
The opportunity to access content online without misrepresentation is a risk that the New Zealand Film Archive (NZFA) has been recently presented with. In what seems like an archive's equivalent of a single heartbeat, the archive has been given 5 years to digitize its entire collection, a project inaugurated last August. Previously, the TV, radio, and film archives were not necessarily part of the same institution or held onto a single standard of archiving. At their minister's simple and dramatic instruction, the three collections were led to integration and to publish their content online as part of the Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision, their new archive for Film, Television and Sound. Presented here by the chief executive Frank Stark, he admits that the challenge for such a deadline boils down to the curatorship of what to save and what to lose. He sees this as a necessary third step after the authentic integration and migration of a refreshed sense of identity.
Alberto Messina related how Italian public broadcaster RAI has just been granted 10 million Euros based on the success of their regional content. Their pilot project, InMediaLoci, reused content from RAI free from copyright about arts, events, landmarks and other interesting sites which are geographically linked. The link was then able to be developed into a mass location-based platform for smart tourism. The bigger project will start with Tuscany and Venice for the valorisation of broadcast content for a new audience through digitization. Be it through audio tours, local images, or user created content, this project aims at something special for each visitor and not just a general sales package.
As such, the Digital Journey marches on. It is a choice that goes beyond the archive itself and hence, what remains clear is that producers, broadcasters and archives of all sorts are integrating further under the digital domain. It is by working closer together that clearer workflows, based on landmark standards such as OAIS, can help disseminate and valorise content beyond the single screen or the traditional archive audience.
MORE INFO
- See more photos, presentations and papers over at the FIAT/IFTA website
- The Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision hosts the Open Images platform for archives who openly publish their collections online - to then for instance make its usable on platforms such as Wikipedia.