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 about the opening session and discussion panel on Saturday morning.
Just before the chance to meet and talk to FIAT/IFTA's own prize winning archives for 2014, Tobias Golodnoff (Danish Broadcasting Corporation) moderated the last day with a technical discussion about the Future of Digital Preservation.
Industry Partners
Presenting for Ericsson was Henk Den Bok. He opened the presentation with a remark about how in his 15-year-commitment to this field, he is impressed with the fact that Moore's Law still holds true for storage media. At the same time, as a strategy solution architect, he believes that future-proof media formats do not exist. As he explained, the bare-necessity of long term digital storage remains to be migration: By following a strict culture of active migration, Ericsson has been able to store lossless content with reliable success.
Looking at an archive as a place for preservation as much as content management and production, Paul Collard from Deluxe introduced his company's software, which focuses on access. As VP of Film and Digital Services for Deluxe Media, he is confident that with all-encompassing software like DL3, an archive should thrive from the constant flow of information from both ends of the OAIS model. Which is why they built the platform to create, market, manage, and showcase archive content for the entire online world, and not just the industry.
The Awards. Photo Credit: Oscar Timmers.
Award Winners
The trend to commoditize tools as much as archival content is a by-product of the digital transition. FIAT/IFTA took its time to explore what drives such a transition, by giving a number of success stories from the 2014 award ceremony centre stage.
By focusing on where the ethics of preservation meet the sociopolitical spirit of the time, two initiatives - one by TV Globo (Brazil) and another by INA (France) - were honoured for their work with the director Luciana Savaget for Serra Pelada and Thomas Johnson for In the Wake of Stalin present. It lead to a discussion about collective memory; producer Sylvia Cazin (INA) and sociologist, Gianni Haver (University of Lausanne) outlined the potential of reuse and how an archive should, sometimes, dare to interpret without losing track of its historical responsibility.
All that Gianni Haver knew about when he watched news broadcasts from his home in the 1980s, was put into question because of Luciana Savaget's research into the published images of Serra Pelada. By repurposing never before seen footage for an international audience, the documentary managed to shed a light on the discrepancies of collective memory. Hence why, hearing the actual voices of people retelling their own story on and seeing unique clips from Brazil's broadcast archives, gave a new life to what an international audience can choose to remember about Serra Palada.
Thomas Johnson indicated that the sources and the technology are finally here to produce and access information with relative ease. It does take someone who knows the collection quite well to "just do it". His own productions are driven by a team of so called Librarian Journalists who produce a program for every Sunday afternoon based on the archive's collection. Just as well, smaller and larger archives have also been reaching out to the rest of the world through user-based platforms like YouTube, and other creative means of exposition.
The Italian Swiss team led by Mauro Ravarelli (RSI Switzerland) applied a culture of exposition beyond the singular screen. In order to share content, they developed a series of mobile totems to travel around several localities. As a team who wants to reach out, it was imminent that access to their collection is done at specific sites other than the archive itself. Hence, each location could act as a branch to reach a wider audience, as much as a method to recuperate information, and feedback, from a variety of sources. With the same bottom-up approach to valorisation, the project managed to garner an innumerable amount of media and intends to travel further across Italy in the near future.
This week we celebrate UNESCO's World Day for Audiovisual Heritage, and with the relative ease of digital access and manipulation, we can only hope that more projects follow up with the same style and culture honoured by FIAT/IFTA awardees in 2014. If you have your own specific archive doing similar work and believe it deserves an honourable mention at the next conference be sure to look for more info here - and good luck!
More info
- For more info on specific projects, please click here
- See more photos, presentations and papers over at the FIAT/IFTA website