On December 4th, audiovisual archivists from across Europe gathered in Paris for a workshop in the context of the Presto4U project. The workshop concentrated on Digital Audiovisual Preservation in Communities of Practice. About 70 audiovisual archivists and vendors from a wide variety of organisations discussed their different needs for knowledge and tools for digitial preservation in the different domains they work in. Museums, archives and service providers all wondered about tools and methods to make their sounds and images survive through the 21st century.
The challenges
Audiovisual archivists know some painful physical processes. Audio tapes shrink and show signs of vinegar syndrome, vinyl discs produce a poisonous white powder, and hard drives and file formats are prone to rapid obsolescence. Yet, in his introduction, Daniel Teruggi (Institut National de l'Audiovisual), who hosted the event, touches upon a sensitive issue: many people who manage audiovisual collections are not trained archivists. They lack the knowledge and insight to preserve their collections. Audiovisual preservation is more often than not a management problem.
Presto4U as a project exists to widen out the scope from previous digital preservation projects from the broadcast realm to the wider community. It wants all these different domains to take up the issue of awareness about preservation solutions for digital audiovisual collections. The big question that guided the day was how different the ailments of these communities really are.
Is it harder for a TV station to safeguard its digital audiovisual materials than for a world-class museum, or for a university? The project’s nine Communities of Practice leaders think so. A Community of Practice (CoP) is a group of people that share a profession and common needs and interests. You may also see these communities as communities of context, meaning the place where all the tera-, peta- and zetabytes of sounds and moving images will eventually be (re-)used. After all, the ways in which our audiovisual memories are used, have an impact on our preservation practices. Image makers who need to reach a return on investment, for example, have a different vision of what constitutes the “long now” than memory institutions have.
The workshop started with each of the nine CoP leaders specifying how different their ailments were from other. Daniel Teruggi demonstrated how Sound and Music Collections are complicated to keep in an organised way. Challenges may seem smaller on a technical level, as file sizes aren’t as big and the domain switched to digital productions so much earlier. However, they function in a complex production environment and archivists may need to wade through hundreds or thousands of files that were created around one music event. Erwin Verbruggen, who leads the TV, Radio and New Media Broadcast CoP, showed how there is a difference in interest between national audiovisual institutions that take care of collections and may operate supported by deposit laws, and broadcasters who have to defend the existence of their archival work versus a dominating production force. Both the Video & Post-Production, guided by Peter Holm Lindgaard, and the Footage Sales Libraries (the responsibility of Marco Rendina) struggle with issues related to this. The Film Collections & Filmmakers domain (led by Thomas Christensen), on the other hand, has a guaranteed look into the far future: after having lost 80% of silent film heritage, film archivists in the 1930s and 40s shaped a field decidedly vowing to prevent such a loss of moving image heritage from ever occurring again.
Our future Cézannes
Museums are not archives, declared Pip Laurenson about her Video Art, Art Museums and Galleries CoP. As a collections conservation specialist, she had little idea about media archiving, until video art started to finding its way into the museum. A work like Bruce Naumann’s Back in the studio 2 brings on new challenges for a domain that focuses on restoring the pristine quality to a work. The piece uses the concept of digital noise and makes use of ‘grungy’ technologies to produce it. An archivist should in this case be careful not to destroy that imperfect aspect of the work. When audience members challenged the future value of artistic experiments with video, Laurenson answered resolutely: “These are our future Cézannes and Van Goghs!’
Universities increasingly need to handle with audiovisual storage and preservation matters - both researchers and teachers do. In the field of learning, audiovisual means and methods rank up both inside and outside classrooms. Massive online courses allow students to follow courses from teaching and learning organisations in all parts of the world, showed Linda Ligios. Fabrizio Falchi introduced the research and scientific domain. Every audiovisual community, you could say, has a proto-disaster story: how wrong things can go if you don’t pay attention to your old materials.
In the research domain, the most famous example of how important images can be, resides with NASA, where engineers accidentally erased the original tapes of the moon landing.Not just astronauts shoot video though: doctors experiment with 4K recordings of operations, biologists record experiments as a means of documenting the outcomes. Seeing that recording media shoot higher and higher quality video, the amount of media that need to be stored keeps growing continuously.
Standards. CC BY-NC by XKCD.
In the eye of the beholder
The afternoon was reserved for group discussions in three different configurations. One group, on Professional Actors (Footage, Film, Broadcast and Post-Production) existed of service providers, archive managers and researchers and expressed a need for education & training for all involved in this domain. Archive personnel needs better and more training in existing archive technologies and tools, and on an organisational level, awareness should be raised about the challenges digital preservation brings. As one participant remarked: “We say we’re the experts, but do we really have the answers to these challenges ourselves?” Audiovisual archives also continuously wonder what kind of knowledge they should develop in-house and what kinds of services could be externalised.
The group on Research and Education concluded that we need to change universities’ way of thinking about preservation and include metadata preservation and linking with objects. The group realised that it needs to rely on industry-approved, standardised technologies for safeguarding audiovisuals. The group discussing areas of Music, Sound and Art expressed the need to focus on the understanding of the OAIS framework and focus on technical challenges. Another ambition the group identified was scalability: can we help artists as well as institutions trying to preserve their own work?
Over the remainder of the Presto4U project, each of the nine Communities will focus on one particular issue, which will be further developed and discussed in future events. We’re looking forward to discussing with you there!
More information
- Read all about the Presto4U project on http://www.presto4u.eu
- This post originally appeared on the PrestoCentre Editorial Team's blog on December 11, 2012