SlideShare ist ein Scribd-Unternehmen logo
1 von 71
Downloaden Sie, um offline zu lesen
WE ARE THE NEW ARCHIVISTS:
ARTISANS, ACTIVISTS, CINEPHILES, CITIZENS
Rick Prelinger
Reimagining the Archive
UCLA, November 2010
Licensed under CC Attribution-Non-Commercial License
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Saturday, November 13, 2010
I’d like to begin by explaining that my talk focuses on issues relating to archives and archivists in
the United States. We have not yet achieved the ambitious and audacious cultural heritage
digitization projects that our colleagues in Europe have realized. These projects demand the
cooperation and consensus of many stakeholders, including cultural ministries and rightsholders.
American archival access and digitization projects tend perhaps to be more entrepreneurial,
smaller-scale, sometimes even scrappy. Perhaps a fusion of approaches may come one day.
100 Reasons to Be Cheerful
http://www.illuminationsmedia.co.uk/blog/index.cfm?start=1&news_id=872
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Earlier today at University College London the British arts TV producer John Wyver argued
that this is a “golden age for the moving image.” Despite the difficulty in funding what
he calls “creative and critical film,” he says “the possibilities are simply incredible now
and in Britain for making, distributing, accessing, watching and using moving images
from both the present and the past.” And he proposes “100 reasons to be cheerful,”
which I reproduce above.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
I cite John’s list (which of course he assembled through crowdsourcing) NOT to make
us feel bad about all of the emergent materials we lack the resources and technology
to collect, but RATHER to suggest that there’s a parallel excitement in the moving
image archives world. I just got back from the AMIA conference in Philadelphia and
was really encouraged by what's happening in our field. There's movement on some
perennially unresolved issues, and many archivists and archival users are doing really
exciting work.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Enclosure used to be the default condition of almost all archival moving images. This is no
longer true. While we haven't made much progress toward changing anachronistic
copyright laws, everyday practice is moving beyond outdated frameworks. The biggest
change is that archives and archivists are trending access-positive -- many no longer
seem to be seeking privileged perches offline. Part of this shift comes from self-
examination, but there's also pressure from commercial services, funders who sometimes
think a few years ahead of grantees, and awareness of what's going on in the other LAM
sectors. Collections are slowly but surely being digitized and made accessible. So while
the battle for universal access to archives isn't yet won, I found myself much more
enthusiastic than I thought I'd be.
Text
David Rice, AMIA 2010
Saturday, November 13, 2010
We're also starting to see a trend away from archives simply relying on tools and
services that were developed for other communities. We're developing our own
hacker community -- a cadre of technically literate archivists and archivist-
engineers who are building sophisticated tools.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
And while moving image archives are still pretty hermetic compared to, let’s
say, public libraries, we’re starting to see ways in which archives actively
reach out to their users and the public and push materials in their direction.
All of these developments bode well for us, I think.
PARIS IN THE 1920S,
OR MOSCOW IN THE 1920S?
Saturday, November 13, 2010
But here's my question. Is this Paris in the 1920s, or Moscow in the 1920s?
Is this an uninhibited efflorescence of ideas, projects, theories that will reverberate over
decades to come, or is it a temporary bloom before a loss of imagination, a crisis of
legitimacy, or even a clampdown?
Saturday, November 13, 2010
To cut to the chase: there are those (including myself) who've predicted that most moving
image archives will become irrelevant, maybe even obsolete, if we cannot shed our legacy
mindsets and limitations, and if we can't mount a strong defense against our emerging
competitors. Can we survive?
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Let's see. I'm going to try to get to this by counterposing a basket of exciting
developments against a wheelbarrow of inherited conditions that I think aren't so good,
and we'll see where we stand.
First, may we agree on one stipulation, at least for tonight:
ENCLOSURE IS NO OPTION
Saturday, November 13, 2010
By now this is an old idea, and I certainly don't want to deliver yet another free
culture keynote. Resource constraints, rights anxieties, lack of acceptance by a
print-centered world and the inhibitions of our legacy culture turned the moving
image archives into a secret garden. Sometimes I feel as though we are among
the last conservationists in an age of abundance, as if we’re trying to protect an
untrodden wilderness from human encroachment. If this is true, and some of
you may argue with this analogy, perhaps it’s time to turn secret gardens into
national parks that are open to all.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
When the YouTubes of the world propagate moving images by the billions every
day, I’m driven to say that the precautionary principle is best applied
homeopathically rather than across the board. So rather than arguing for archival
openness for the nth time, I'm going to assume that we've collectively decided
that we want to make archival material universally available to all. Cultural
capital founds itself not upon scarcity but on abundance. I realize that there are
many exceptions, and that funds are lacking. But let’s assume we’re trying.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
What are some of the unexamined obstacles to this? Who are the new archivists and
archival users who are going to make this happen? And what roles will we play? I'd
like to try and describe some attributes of the emerging actor who is going to enable
the pursuit of endless possibility.
Let’s first get the obstacles out of the way.
ARCHIVES: BIG OR SMALL
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Thought experiment. If we can pretend for a moment that the emotional and cerebral
intensity of a movie equals life, is archival footage [in all its authenticity, wonder and
surprise] bigger than life, or is it smaller?
You might never have asked this question, but I've thought about it a lot while making my
movie Panorama Ephemera, while compiling the annual Lost Landscapes of San Francisco
and Detroit shows, and especially while looking at raw archival material for my current
film-in-progress.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Since I identify as an archivist, archival footage isn't just one of a number of elements in a story,
it IS the story. The show starts for me when archival footage comes on screen. During
documentaries, I find myself nodding out during talking heads and sitting up for archival
material. Of course, I'm not an average viewer.
Let me try saying this another way. Why does historical footage often seem to retreat into the
background while contemporary imagery seizes the foreground? Why do historical images tend
to appear smaller than life, while contemporary images often seem larger than life, hyperreal,
more revved up?
archival = cool, cerebral
contemporary = warm, immersive
simulation = near-infinite modalities
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Archival footage feels immersive to archivists because we love it and have trained
ourselves to meet it more than halfway. But to other kinds of viewers, I suspect that
archival sequences might not always constitute the most compelling moments. Why
does archival equal cool and cerebral while contemporary equals warm and
immersive? And why would members of an audience already motivated to watch a
historically-focused piece find actual historical footage less interesting than, let's
say, a reenactment or even a simulation?
Saturday, November 13, 2010
As I said, I've thought about these questions while looking at work I've made on a
laptop projected on a big screen. And I started thinking about them again recently,
while attending a lecture on 20th-century music by Alex Ross and Ethan Iverson.
Specifically, I started to wonder why archival footage never gets to pull its own
weight. Silent footage is almost always "enhanced" by sound effects. Music, often
emotionally and intellectually invasive, overwhelms the images. We rarely see more
than a few seconds of archival material without some kind of sweetening or
overdetermination, the proverbial "spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down."
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Why aren't the images enough by themselves? Is archival footage like a plate of
unseasoned steamed zucchini?
If archival material is considered too old-fashioned, too boring, too distancing to show, or
alternatively, too familiar, this won’t enhance the destination appeal of archives. And I'd
worry about that.
Tunnel to Battery Construction 129, Hawk Hill, Marin Headlands, California
Saturday, November 13, 2010
I think we might be moving into an era in which footage of historical events and
situations may be more highly valued as reference material than as functioning
elements of a work. While I'm sure we'll still see tons of archival footage on screen
and on air, I think we're going to see many instances where historical images will
simply function as templates for higher-production-value immersive dramatizations.
Why use "old clips" when you can build more immersive sequences on the desktop?
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Not that I’m against using archives to build simulations and artificial worlds. Such use, if
inventive, could emulsify past and future in fascinating ways while generating lucrative
invoices for financially pressed archives. But I wonder whether rejecting original
documents in favor of hyperreal re-creations will marginalize us. If we are to avoid the
devaluation of the historical document, we must try our best to defend the power of the
original image. As archivist Pam Wintle once told me, "every frame is precious," and while
our senses of cultural and historical value may vary over time, we have only one chance to
document an event and infinite opportunities to reconstruct it as it never occurred.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
I may be arguing from a rarefied position, but I'd worry if arguing for the legitimacy
of the archival document became characterized as a rarefied position.
DATA IS A LIABILITY, OR
THE FALSE GOD OF MARKET VALUE
Saturday, November 13, 2010
I was recently at THATCamp, an unconference that takes place all around the country
focusing on the emergent digital humanities field. People were talking about metadata
and the importance of describing raw information. An attendee who had previously
worked at an unsuccessful geospatial data company explained what happened when the
company closed down and its workers rushed to find new homes for its datasets. This, he
told us, was very difficult, and it was harder because of the need to describe the contents
and organization of the data. "Data," he said, "is a liability."
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Now, all of us collect a lot of data. My little archives collects print materials;
we collect smallgauge film; and, increasingly, collects both born-digital and
digitized moving images and the associated metadata. Is collecting like a
game of Hearts, where every gain is also a loss?
Saturday, November 13, 2010
"Data is a liability." Most of us (especially those in the commercial sector) would
describe data as an asset. But let's think historically. Does the value of data — and,
by extension, the value of moving images, which are, after all, very rich data —
fluctuate over time? And if moving images are also data -- albeit a rich form of data
-- might we also say that moving images could become a liability? This would
constitute a nearly unsoluble riddle for archives.
2010-11-08
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Before I lose you, let's take a moment to review what this week’s version of Wikipedia
has to say about fair market value. "Fair market value (FMV) is an estimate of the
market value of a property, based on what a knowledgeable, willing, and
unpressured buyer would probably pay to a knowledgeable, willing, and unpressured
seller.... An estimate of fair market value may be founded either on precedent or
extrapolation."
Saturday, November 13, 2010
OK, let's extrapolate a bit. With a few conspicuous exceptions, the price of 16mm
and 35mm film on the collectors' market is dropping, except for a few categories —
35mm IB Tech prints of MGM musicals and home movies showing 1930s Europe, to
pick a couple of examples. I see a slackening of the frenzy that once swept through
eBay. Why collect film when you can collect DVDs or leech tens of thousands of
torrents from the cloud? Fewer individuals seem to care about preserving their
particular versions of the live theatrical experience.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
On a more macro level, the large archives are filling up. While there are a few happy
exceptions, there is less money and less room for large film acquisitions. While
almost no one would dispute the "artistic, cultural and historical" value of moving
image collections, their fair market value (such as it is) seems to be decreasing.
Several large significant collections languished on the market for a long time before
fortunately being acquired by large institutions, and there are still important
collections that are hurting for homes. My sense is that this situation prevails in the
audio and textual realms as well.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Film is becoming a liability, even as the images it contains become more sought
after by more people. Fair market value has lost sync with cultural and historical
value. I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that increasingly high-quality
digitization will cause the sanctions against discarding original film (and certainly
videotape) to disappear. Tape too will become a liability. First they came for the
newspapers, then they came for the books, now for the films and tapes. (One day, of
course, they'll come for the data.)
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Tape is a liability. Film is a liability. These are incendiary statements. It might be
more precise to say that "aging data is a liability," or that "old media is a
liability." But just as a society should judge itself by how well it takes care of its
most vulnerable members, we might similarly dedicate ourselves as archivists to
collecting, preserving and providing access to moving images fixed in their
native formats.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
While I don't want to join the chorus of archivists (and journalists) who reflexively bemoan the
loss of tangible assets, there's a real question here. It may well be that we should thin our film
and tape holdings, and that digitization/deaccession may be appropriate or unavoidable in
some cases. But that's a question for broad discussion. In the past, I've suggested that we take
a leaf from the environmental movement and require "digitization impact statements" and
"preservation impact statements" when we undertake grand projects, in order to better
understand their broad cultural and historical impact. In any case, I don't think that decisions to
migrate and destroy material should be made in private. While a single decision may seem
trivial or obvious, the sum of many decisions will change history.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
An aesthete would readily remark that fair market value is the enemy of culture.
For archivists, fair market value may be the enemy of the historical record. We
would do well to try to reformulate what kind of value matters for us and for the
records we try to preserve, and what kind of sense of value we wish to inculcate
in our public. Otherwise, the new will continue to discredit the old, and the
archival mission will present to the public as an increasingly quixotic pursuit.
WE STILL HAVE THE MATERIALS!
Saturday, November 13, 2010
When we warn of the obsolescence of archives, there’s one thing we shouldn't
forget. The world may be choked with free, degraded-resolution,
decontextualized, poorly indexed, misidentified, sliced and diced moving
images. But archives still hold the high-quality material, much of which is
UNIQUE, and we know a lot about its context.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
I think the case for the essentiality and authority of archives is strong. Alexander
Horwath, David Francis, Paolo Cherchi-Usai and Michael Loebenstein discuss this at
length in their fascinating conversation on film curatorship, published by the
Austrian Film Museum.
Unfortunately the book, which is excellent, is also permeated with a discourse of
loss, and a suggestion that the propagation of scarcity is inherent in the ethical
archivists’ work. I do not know how we will read it in twenty, or even five years from
now.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
I don’t believe that we’re faced with either/or alternatives as dramatic as we sometimes
hear. Just as DVDs and online video haven’t killed off silent film culture (quite the
opposite!), cellphone videos will not kill the theatrical experience. Ubiquitous distribution
of archival films will not prevent people from meeting in big rooms to engage in collective
experiences.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
The retreat from public space that we see today -- the media rooms, the home theaters,
the Netflix subscriptions -- won’t disappear, but it will coexist with shared experiences
that involve either physical presence or enhanced virtual presence. It’s reductive and
ahistorical to imagine that vectors of sociotechnological change move in a single
direction, though it may make for more sensational press.
Anyway, why shouldn't moving images (especially nontheatrical ones) flow freely through
the culture? Books do. Photographs do. Music does. Soon templates that describe three-
dimensional objects that are ready for printing at your local Kinko’s 3-D Maker Shop will,
too. The introduction of each of these forms has been accompanied by contending
business models, slippage and stealing, and moral panics. But we still have our
manuscripts, incunabula, photographic prints and, for many of us, our LPs.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Do we want to repeat the kind of enclosure that's characteristic of art museums, who tend
to try to control images of the works they hold? Is the digital object a precious object, or a
devalued object? from the viewpoint of the archivist, surrogates are often "pictures of
movies," in the same sense that art books contain pictures of artworks. From the
viewpoint of the collector or cinephile, this is not clear. Some of us take the long plane
ride to Pordenone while others of us collect DVDs. But I contend that new kinds of value
are created when analog objects transmute into digital ones. The value that accrues when
works propagate throughout the culture and alight here and there to grow roots. The
value that multiples when new works are derived from old. The value that grows out of
simple repetition – no one can contend that "Stairway to Heaven" is devalued by being
played every 30 seconds somewhere on American radio.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Curatorship is often presented as the primary, irreducible function of archives. Well, OK. But will we
be able to argue for the continued bundling of archival curatorship and collecting, storing and
maintaining a physical collection? Can we demonstrate this to a world where millions of people have
already become file managers? Will curators work in proximity to cans and reels? Or will moving
image archives follow the lead of the production industry, which stashes original film elements
underground and builds a staff of screengazers who maintain, manipulate and distribute digital
surrogates?
I have no immediate answer to this question, and it would be presumptuous to pretend I did.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
But this debate cannot take place over our heads. We must define our interest and pursue it.
The problem is that archives have often abdicated any control over the material they hold and
tend to serve as surrogate gatekeepers for copyright holders who support archives as long as
it’s convenient to do so. Archives need to define their own interest.
ARTISANSHIP AND ACTIVISM
Saturday, November 13, 2010
I am not as much of an artisan as many of you, but I love working with film. I have been
working with amateur and home movies intensively for two years now. It has occupied
far more of my time than I ever expected, and it has been very fulfilling.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
But the laying on of hands, while essential and gratifying on so many levels, has
become an accelerating road to marginality. Now that doesn't mean we should not be
hands-on archivists –- we should just realize the limits of the artisanal role.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
As we all know, artisanship has historically been challenged by technology and industrialization.
And now almost every one of us has the capability to become a little Henry Ford, if we come up with
a good idea. Today every laptop contains image-capture and image-editing tools and a link to the
Internet.
The painstaking work of film preservation and restoration is already being automated.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
It is unlikely there will be paid work for all those who want to become artisans of media
preservation. As analog workflows become the exception rather than the rule, preservation will
unavoidably involve getting film to run through scanners as best as we can so that digital artists
and file managers can do restoration on the desktop, using increasingly automated tools.
Scribes gave way to copy clerks to typists to word processors to Microsoft Word. While we will
still have our Bob Gitts and Mark Toscanos, it will be a rare project that can afford their
concentration and skills.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
I don’t want to see preservation slip away from us. Right now we need to figure out
what the specificity of our field will be. And I think that if we’re going to do this, we
need to look up from our benches and have a serious conversation. This is what
atomic scientists tried to do after Hiroshima, to argue for world control over nuclear
science and energy. Unfortunately, they lost. This is what programmers have done
and continue to do, and it’s why we have a mixed economy of software, where some
coders work in cubes for large enterprises while others work at home to build open-
source apps and tools and derive a different kind of income.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Perhaps we need to take a cue from some of the young farmers who are populating
both cities and the rural fringe. Some of the best of them (I'm thinking especially of
the Greenhorns) see agriculture today as a neo-Jeffersonian pursuit – they see
farming not simply as a means to produce good and healthy food, but as a practice
that will generate not only food but ideas. At best they aspire to turn farmers into
citizen intellectuals as they were in the early Federal period, and turn the countryside
into an incubator for all kinds of ideas.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Can archival artisans step out of our quotidian, constrained experience and shoulder part of the
responsibility for steering archives into the future? It would be wonderful.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Most moving image archives are accidental. Yes, the larger institutions were founded for that
specific purpose, and there are specialized institutions that were born to preserve moving images.
But most started collecting by accident and preserving out of necessity.
And most archivists are latchkey children, working in isolation from the broader culture.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Archivists are in a unique position to experiment -- to question limits and boundaries that may no
longer make sense to obey. As farmers are trying to construct a new food system, can archivists
construct a new ecology of archives and archival material?
The alternative is that this will be done for us without our involvement. I think of the research and
public librarians who guarded hundreds of millions of volumes in vain. Data is a liability, and it’s
possible the artisan archivist will also be a liability if he and she do not take an active part in
proposing their future. It is up to archivists to be advocates for archives.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
The other primary advocates, of course, will be archival users, who are archivists' greatest
allies. Most institutions will not offer free, ubiquitous access to collections without a
struggle. This doesn’t mean archivists are bad people -- but they are resource-poor, and
second-guessed by a legacy culture. (Now, it may not be like this at UCLA or the Library of
Congress, but check out your local historical society, a stock footage company, or a poorly
funded university archives.) They need resources, and it may be up to the user to fight for
the archives.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
I'd love to work on a Young (and Old) Archivists handbook. anyone interested?
CINEPHILIA AND CITIZENSHIP
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Cinephilia is the condition uniting almost all of us who work in the moving image archives field. The
objects of our desire may vary -- I’m fixated on amateur and home movies, and occasionally my eye
strays towards sponsored films of exceptional virtue -- but we are just about all cinephiles.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
There’s nothing particularly wrong with cinephilia. To some extent it motivates archivists to collect
and preserve materials that might otherwise be at risk, and it’s one of the drivers of cinema culture.
But all that said, I’m not sure it can motivate archivists (and archival users) towards assuming
broader civic roles. Let me try to explain.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
At this moment, archives and archival practice desperately need advocates. We are questioned, and
actually threatened, from many directions. I don’t need to describe the fiscal constraints that
archives have always endured, and which are especially tight right now. More fundamentally, most
archives (whether publicly supported or not) are sustained out of a frequently unspoken consensus
that we serve a valuable cultural and social function. We have had a hard time explaining this to
funders, to those to whom we report, and to members of the public who don’t yet understand that
we are not public libraries or YouTube. It is up to us to find new narratives for existing services
at the same time we develop new ones.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
I do not question devotion to the cinema, but this is the time to face outward. While archives have
never been so popular nor so central to our culture, we’ve also never faced so many potentially
destructive trends. Devotion will not prevent defunding. Cinephilia cannot stave off the forces of
commercialization.
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...
— Robert C. Binkley, 1939
Saturday, November 13, 2010
To cinephiles, I would counterpose the role of citizen archivists. I talked about this a
few years back, suggesting that history, memory and cultural continuity were civic
functions and that archivists should think of themselves as citizens with civic
responsibilities. This could mean many things, but at minimum it indicates that
archivists need to be advocates for their work and their institutions in the public
sphere. The term was recently appropriated in a different sense by David Ferriero,
the new AOTUS, when he suggested that the archival field should make more room
for uncredentialed citizen volunteers. It created a little controversy.
A PLACE OF ORIGIN
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Saturday, November 13, 2010
A couple of years ago I was walking down the street in Pittsburgh with Janet Céja, whom
some of you may know. She was telling me how she’d tried to get her Cinema Studies
students interested in archives, but they didn't care. I asked why, and she said "I guess
they felt archives were the end of it all, the place where films go to die." This was a big
a-ha moment for me, because I realized we’d all got things completely backwards. I
thought, what if we reconceive the archive as a point of origin, as a birthplace for new
works and a rebirthing venue for old works? If we think of the archive as an incubation
point, suddenly a cloak of bad ideas starts to slip away.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Archives promise the possibility of a return to original, unmediated documents. I think this is part
of their attraction to artists — the idea that we can touch and use archival records without also
having to inherit the corrupting crust that they’ve accreted over time. This is an Edenic fantasy, but
it can also be a productive point of origin.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Had I a single thing to say, it would be: exit the dark, come into the light.
Legacy archival practices parallel those of legacy film spectatorship. Often
solitary, certainly auratic, both rest upon the presumption that objects and
experiences are incapable of near-infinite replication. These venerable
practices will not disappear, but coexist with the new archival work...
new archival practice:
reaches out to current & potential audiences &
users
recognizes its effect within & upon the public
sphere
values open information, techniques, ethics,
process
rejects institutional, disciplinary, regional &
community boundaries
values the periphery as frontier, a birthplace of
innovative ideas & practices
Saturday, November 13, 2010
...which needs to be SOCIAL. PUBLIC. TRANSPARENT. COLLABORATIVE AND
DECENTRALIZED.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
We have worked for too long in the background for too few clients. While we were working with
studios, media producers, DVD distributors and the occasional scholar, archives went retail. The
public started knocking on the doors, and much of the time we didn’t answer.
We must instead turn ourselves into cultural producers.
WHO ARE THE NEW ARCHIVISTS?
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Saturday, November 13, 2010
The new archivists will find new outlets for artisanal practices in the digital age. They will,
I hope, find ways to be public advocates for themselves and their institutions.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
The new archivists aren’t anti-technology, but deploy an amalgam of new and old technologies
while trying to be mindful of how workflow may embody unexamined ideologies and controls.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
The new archivists won’t shrink from advancing archival theory and practice. Archives shouldn’t
only be repositories, but also workshops -- places where ideas originate and are tested, and
centers for the development of tools, services and applications. One very concrete suggestion:
archives might host unconferences like Code4Lib and THATCamp, which have both met in many
locations and resulted in the development of actionable tools and ideas.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
The new archivists are synthesists, remixers, mashers-up. They aren’t hesitant to find inspiration in
other fields, whether it’s libraries, museums, the emerging digital humanities field, the tech
community, maker culture, social activism, the art world, and even the food futurist movement.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
The new archivists see themselves and their institutions not as terminal zones for
dead media, but as cultural producers whose intervention in the media stream is as
essential as anyone else’s. By pushing holdings out to the public, we can reinflect the
present with the past and affect the future.
PARIS IN THE 1920S,
OR MOSCOW IN THE 1920S?
Saturday, November 13, 2010
I ask again. Where does all of this leave us? And I will try to answer. I believe our
prognosis will be determined by the degree of autonomy that we assert. If we can
avoid asymmetric and unequal partnerships; if we can successfully advocate for our
essentiality and specificity in an era when all forms of communication are being
reduced to fungible bits; and if we can simultaneously be artisans, lovers of film and
social beings, we will probably make it.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Information is becoming an entitlement, first in the developed world, but soon
everywhere. The demand is insatiable, but so is the supply. And we can’t begin
to imagine how much curators and contextualizers will be in demand. While
machines will fulfill some of these functions, I don’t think people will be satisfied
with computed curation. If we assert the value of our contributions, I think we’ll
have more than 100 reasons to be cheerful.
Photo: Jose Maria “Chema” Barredo
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Culture, like water, small animals and seeds in the wind, is hard to enclose. But
culture is also fragile. If we start to run into involuntary limits on our mobility, our
metabolism, and our freedom to consume, it will be interesting to see what forms of
cultural activity survive.
rick@archive.org
http://www.prelingerlibrary.org
http://blackoystercatcher.blogspot.com
Saturday, November 13, 2010

Weitere ähnliche Inhalte

Ähnlich wie Reimagining the Archive keynote presentation

The Future of Memory: Disrupting the Archives to Save It
The Future of Memory: Disrupting the Archives to Save ItThe Future of Memory: Disrupting the Archives to Save It
The Future of Memory: Disrupting the Archives to Save ItRick Prelinger
 
The New Evidentiary Cinema
The New Evidentiary CinemaThe New Evidentiary Cinema
The New Evidentiary CinemaRick Prelinger
 
History Is One Second Ago, and How You Can Intervene in the Future
History Is One Second Ago, and How You Can Intervene in the FutureHistory Is One Second Ago, and How You Can Intervene in the Future
History Is One Second Ago, and How You Can Intervene in the FutureRick Prelinger
 
Inconvenient materialities
Inconvenient materialitiesInconvenient materialities
Inconvenient materialitiesRick Prelinger
 
Ephemeral to Canonical: The First 33 and the Next 100 Years of Collecting Use...
Ephemeral to Canonical: The First 33 and the Next 100 Years of Collecting Use...Ephemeral to Canonical: The First 33 and the Next 100 Years of Collecting Use...
Ephemeral to Canonical: The First 33 and the Next 100 Years of Collecting Use...Rick Prelinger
 
Nos archives inglese
Nos archives ingleseNos archives inglese
Nos archives ingleseFIAT/IFTA
 
What is the Role of the Professional Archivist in the Evolving Archival Space?
What is the Role of the Professional Archivist in the Evolving Archival Space?What is the Role of the Professional Archivist in the Evolving Archival Space?
What is the Role of the Professional Archivist in the Evolving Archival Space?Kate Theimer
 
Food Inc Documentary
Food Inc DocumentaryFood Inc Documentary
Food Inc DocumentaryHeidi Owens
 
MW2010: N. Proctor, The Museum Is Mobile: Cross-platform content design for a...
MW2010: N. Proctor, The Museum Is Mobile: Cross-platform content design for a...MW2010: N. Proctor, The Museum Is Mobile: Cross-platform content design for a...
MW2010: N. Proctor, The Museum Is Mobile: Cross-platform content design for a...museums and the web
 
The Archive We Dont Know
The Archive We Dont KnowThe Archive We Dont Know
The Archive We Dont KnowRick Prelinger
 
Populism, Digitization and Plenty: An Online Film Archives at 15
Populism, Digitization and Plenty: An Online Film Archives at 15Populism, Digitization and Plenty: An Online Film Archives at 15
Populism, Digitization and Plenty: An Online Film Archives at 15Rick Prelinger
 
Archives&Access&Alternatives
Archives&Access&AlternativesArchives&Access&Alternatives
Archives&Access&AlternativesRick Prelinger
 
2025 Libraries
2025 Libraries2025 Libraries
2025 Librariesdherman101
 
Jack the Museum (Museums in the Age of Scale) -- Text version
Jack the Museum (Museums in the Age of Scale) -- Text versionJack the Museum (Museums in the Age of Scale) -- Text version
Jack the Museum (Museums in the Age of Scale) -- Text versionMichael Edson
 
1. research + initial ideas unit 9
1. research + initial ideas   unit 91. research + initial ideas   unit 9
1. research + initial ideas unit 9Rhys Sadler-Scott
 
Original Essays. Essay examples for scholarships 妙義龍倶楽部
Original Essays. Essay examples for scholarships  妙義龍倶楽部Original Essays. Essay examples for scholarships  妙義龍倶楽部
Original Essays. Essay examples for scholarships 妙義龍倶楽部Liz Milligan
 

Ähnlich wie Reimagining the Archive keynote presentation (20)

The Future of Memory: Disrupting the Archives to Save It
The Future of Memory: Disrupting the Archives to Save ItThe Future of Memory: Disrupting the Archives to Save It
The Future of Memory: Disrupting the Archives to Save It
 
The New Evidentiary Cinema
The New Evidentiary CinemaThe New Evidentiary Cinema
The New Evidentiary Cinema
 
History Is One Second Ago, and How You Can Intervene in the Future
History Is One Second Ago, and How You Can Intervene in the FutureHistory Is One Second Ago, and How You Can Intervene in the Future
History Is One Second Ago, and How You Can Intervene in the Future
 
Inconvenient materialities
Inconvenient materialitiesInconvenient materialities
Inconvenient materialities
 
Ephemeral to Canonical: The First 33 and the Next 100 Years of Collecting Use...
Ephemeral to Canonical: The First 33 and the Next 100 Years of Collecting Use...Ephemeral to Canonical: The First 33 and the Next 100 Years of Collecting Use...
Ephemeral to Canonical: The First 33 and the Next 100 Years of Collecting Use...
 
Nos archives inglese
Nos archives ingleseNos archives inglese
Nos archives inglese
 
What is the Role of the Professional Archivist in the Evolving Archival Space?
What is the Role of the Professional Archivist in the Evolving Archival Space?What is the Role of the Professional Archivist in the Evolving Archival Space?
What is the Role of the Professional Archivist in the Evolving Archival Space?
 
Food Inc Documentary
Food Inc DocumentaryFood Inc Documentary
Food Inc Documentary
 
MW2010: N. Proctor, The Museum Is Mobile: Cross-platform content design for a...
MW2010: N. Proctor, The Museum Is Mobile: Cross-platform content design for a...MW2010: N. Proctor, The Museum Is Mobile: Cross-platform content design for a...
MW2010: N. Proctor, The Museum Is Mobile: Cross-platform content design for a...
 
The Noisy Archives
The Noisy ArchivesThe Noisy Archives
The Noisy Archives
 
The Archive We Dont Know
The Archive We Dont KnowThe Archive We Dont Know
The Archive We Dont Know
 
Populism, Digitization and Plenty: An Online Film Archives at 15
Populism, Digitization and Plenty: An Online Film Archives at 15Populism, Digitization and Plenty: An Online Film Archives at 15
Populism, Digitization and Plenty: An Online Film Archives at 15
 
SEARCH, CITE, EVALUATE
SEARCH, CITE, EVALUATESEARCH, CITE, EVALUATE
SEARCH, CITE, EVALUATE
 
Archives&Access&Alternatives
Archives&Access&AlternativesArchives&Access&Alternatives
Archives&Access&Alternatives
 
2025 Libraries
2025 Libraries2025 Libraries
2025 Libraries
 
Jack the Museum (Museums in the Age of Scale) -- Text version
Jack the Museum (Museums in the Age of Scale) -- Text versionJack the Museum (Museums in the Age of Scale) -- Text version
Jack the Museum (Museums in the Age of Scale) -- Text version
 
1. research + initial ideas unit 9
1. research + initial ideas   unit 91. research + initial ideas   unit 9
1. research + initial ideas unit 9
 
Project 4 part i
Project 4 part iProject 4 part i
Project 4 part i
 
Original Essays.pdf
Original Essays.pdfOriginal Essays.pdf
Original Essays.pdf
 
Original Essays. Essay examples for scholarships 妙義龍倶楽部
Original Essays. Essay examples for scholarships  妙義龍倶楽部Original Essays. Essay examples for scholarships  妙義龍倶楽部
Original Essays. Essay examples for scholarships 妙義龍倶楽部
 

Kürzlich hochgeladen

TrustArc Webinar - Stay Ahead of US State Data Privacy Law Developments
TrustArc Webinar - Stay Ahead of US State Data Privacy Law DevelopmentsTrustArc Webinar - Stay Ahead of US State Data Privacy Law Developments
TrustArc Webinar - Stay Ahead of US State Data Privacy Law DevelopmentsTrustArc
 
How to convert PDF to text with Nanonets
How to convert PDF to text with NanonetsHow to convert PDF to text with Nanonets
How to convert PDF to text with Nanonetsnaman860154
 
What Are The Drone Anti-jamming Systems Technology?
What Are The Drone Anti-jamming Systems Technology?What Are The Drone Anti-jamming Systems Technology?
What Are The Drone Anti-jamming Systems Technology?Antenna Manufacturer Coco
 
Strategies for Landing an Oracle DBA Job as a Fresher
Strategies for Landing an Oracle DBA Job as a FresherStrategies for Landing an Oracle DBA Job as a Fresher
Strategies for Landing an Oracle DBA Job as a FresherRemote DBA Services
 
08448380779 Call Girls In Diplomatic Enclave Women Seeking Men
08448380779 Call Girls In Diplomatic Enclave Women Seeking Men08448380779 Call Girls In Diplomatic Enclave Women Seeking Men
08448380779 Call Girls In Diplomatic Enclave Women Seeking MenDelhi Call girls
 
EIS-Webinar-Prompt-Knowledge-Eng-2024-04-08.pptx
EIS-Webinar-Prompt-Knowledge-Eng-2024-04-08.pptxEIS-Webinar-Prompt-Knowledge-Eng-2024-04-08.pptx
EIS-Webinar-Prompt-Knowledge-Eng-2024-04-08.pptxEarley Information Science
 
Powerful Google developer tools for immediate impact! (2023-24 C)
Powerful Google developer tools for immediate impact! (2023-24 C)Powerful Google developer tools for immediate impact! (2023-24 C)
Powerful Google developer tools for immediate impact! (2023-24 C)wesley chun
 
Strategies for Unlocking Knowledge Management in Microsoft 365 in the Copilot...
Strategies for Unlocking Knowledge Management in Microsoft 365 in the Copilot...Strategies for Unlocking Knowledge Management in Microsoft 365 in the Copilot...
Strategies for Unlocking Knowledge Management in Microsoft 365 in the Copilot...Drew Madelung
 
[2024]Digital Global Overview Report 2024 Meltwater.pdf
[2024]Digital Global Overview Report 2024 Meltwater.pdf[2024]Digital Global Overview Report 2024 Meltwater.pdf
[2024]Digital Global Overview Report 2024 Meltwater.pdfhans926745
 
08448380779 Call Girls In Friends Colony Women Seeking Men
08448380779 Call Girls In Friends Colony Women Seeking Men08448380779 Call Girls In Friends Colony Women Seeking Men
08448380779 Call Girls In Friends Colony Women Seeking MenDelhi Call girls
 
08448380779 Call Girls In Civil Lines Women Seeking Men
08448380779 Call Girls In Civil Lines Women Seeking Men08448380779 Call Girls In Civil Lines Women Seeking Men
08448380779 Call Girls In Civil Lines Women Seeking MenDelhi Call girls
 
Scaling API-first – The story of a global engineering organization
Scaling API-first – The story of a global engineering organizationScaling API-first – The story of a global engineering organization
Scaling API-first – The story of a global engineering organizationRadu Cotescu
 
2024: Domino Containers - The Next Step. News from the Domino Container commu...
2024: Domino Containers - The Next Step. News from the Domino Container commu...2024: Domino Containers - The Next Step. News from the Domino Container commu...
2024: Domino Containers - The Next Step. News from the Domino Container commu...Martijn de Jong
 
From Event to Action: Accelerate Your Decision Making with Real-Time Automation
From Event to Action: Accelerate Your Decision Making with Real-Time AutomationFrom Event to Action: Accelerate Your Decision Making with Real-Time Automation
From Event to Action: Accelerate Your Decision Making with Real-Time AutomationSafe Software
 
Strategize a Smooth Tenant-to-tenant Migration and Copilot Takeoff
Strategize a Smooth Tenant-to-tenant Migration and Copilot TakeoffStrategize a Smooth Tenant-to-tenant Migration and Copilot Takeoff
Strategize a Smooth Tenant-to-tenant Migration and Copilot Takeoffsammart93
 
CNv6 Instructor Chapter 6 Quality of Service
CNv6 Instructor Chapter 6 Quality of ServiceCNv6 Instructor Chapter 6 Quality of Service
CNv6 Instructor Chapter 6 Quality of Servicegiselly40
 
Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance Company - Insurer Innovation Award 2024
Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance Company - Insurer Innovation Award 2024Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance Company - Insurer Innovation Award 2024
Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance Company - Insurer Innovation Award 2024The Digital Insurer
 
🐬 The future of MySQL is Postgres 🐘
🐬  The future of MySQL is Postgres   🐘🐬  The future of MySQL is Postgres   🐘
🐬 The future of MySQL is Postgres 🐘RTylerCroy
 
Histor y of HAM Radio presentation slide
Histor y of HAM Radio presentation slideHistor y of HAM Radio presentation slide
Histor y of HAM Radio presentation slidevu2urc
 
Boost PC performance: How more available memory can improve productivity
Boost PC performance: How more available memory can improve productivityBoost PC performance: How more available memory can improve productivity
Boost PC performance: How more available memory can improve productivityPrincipled Technologies
 

Kürzlich hochgeladen (20)

TrustArc Webinar - Stay Ahead of US State Data Privacy Law Developments
TrustArc Webinar - Stay Ahead of US State Data Privacy Law DevelopmentsTrustArc Webinar - Stay Ahead of US State Data Privacy Law Developments
TrustArc Webinar - Stay Ahead of US State Data Privacy Law Developments
 
How to convert PDF to text with Nanonets
How to convert PDF to text with NanonetsHow to convert PDF to text with Nanonets
How to convert PDF to text with Nanonets
 
What Are The Drone Anti-jamming Systems Technology?
What Are The Drone Anti-jamming Systems Technology?What Are The Drone Anti-jamming Systems Technology?
What Are The Drone Anti-jamming Systems Technology?
 
Strategies for Landing an Oracle DBA Job as a Fresher
Strategies for Landing an Oracle DBA Job as a FresherStrategies for Landing an Oracle DBA Job as a Fresher
Strategies for Landing an Oracle DBA Job as a Fresher
 
08448380779 Call Girls In Diplomatic Enclave Women Seeking Men
08448380779 Call Girls In Diplomatic Enclave Women Seeking Men08448380779 Call Girls In Diplomatic Enclave Women Seeking Men
08448380779 Call Girls In Diplomatic Enclave Women Seeking Men
 
EIS-Webinar-Prompt-Knowledge-Eng-2024-04-08.pptx
EIS-Webinar-Prompt-Knowledge-Eng-2024-04-08.pptxEIS-Webinar-Prompt-Knowledge-Eng-2024-04-08.pptx
EIS-Webinar-Prompt-Knowledge-Eng-2024-04-08.pptx
 
Powerful Google developer tools for immediate impact! (2023-24 C)
Powerful Google developer tools for immediate impact! (2023-24 C)Powerful Google developer tools for immediate impact! (2023-24 C)
Powerful Google developer tools for immediate impact! (2023-24 C)
 
Strategies for Unlocking Knowledge Management in Microsoft 365 in the Copilot...
Strategies for Unlocking Knowledge Management in Microsoft 365 in the Copilot...Strategies for Unlocking Knowledge Management in Microsoft 365 in the Copilot...
Strategies for Unlocking Knowledge Management in Microsoft 365 in the Copilot...
 
[2024]Digital Global Overview Report 2024 Meltwater.pdf
[2024]Digital Global Overview Report 2024 Meltwater.pdf[2024]Digital Global Overview Report 2024 Meltwater.pdf
[2024]Digital Global Overview Report 2024 Meltwater.pdf
 
08448380779 Call Girls In Friends Colony Women Seeking Men
08448380779 Call Girls In Friends Colony Women Seeking Men08448380779 Call Girls In Friends Colony Women Seeking Men
08448380779 Call Girls In Friends Colony Women Seeking Men
 
08448380779 Call Girls In Civil Lines Women Seeking Men
08448380779 Call Girls In Civil Lines Women Seeking Men08448380779 Call Girls In Civil Lines Women Seeking Men
08448380779 Call Girls In Civil Lines Women Seeking Men
 
Scaling API-first – The story of a global engineering organization
Scaling API-first – The story of a global engineering organizationScaling API-first – The story of a global engineering organization
Scaling API-first – The story of a global engineering organization
 
2024: Domino Containers - The Next Step. News from the Domino Container commu...
2024: Domino Containers - The Next Step. News from the Domino Container commu...2024: Domino Containers - The Next Step. News from the Domino Container commu...
2024: Domino Containers - The Next Step. News from the Domino Container commu...
 
From Event to Action: Accelerate Your Decision Making with Real-Time Automation
From Event to Action: Accelerate Your Decision Making with Real-Time AutomationFrom Event to Action: Accelerate Your Decision Making with Real-Time Automation
From Event to Action: Accelerate Your Decision Making with Real-Time Automation
 
Strategize a Smooth Tenant-to-tenant Migration and Copilot Takeoff
Strategize a Smooth Tenant-to-tenant Migration and Copilot TakeoffStrategize a Smooth Tenant-to-tenant Migration and Copilot Takeoff
Strategize a Smooth Tenant-to-tenant Migration and Copilot Takeoff
 
CNv6 Instructor Chapter 6 Quality of Service
CNv6 Instructor Chapter 6 Quality of ServiceCNv6 Instructor Chapter 6 Quality of Service
CNv6 Instructor Chapter 6 Quality of Service
 
Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance Company - Insurer Innovation Award 2024
Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance Company - Insurer Innovation Award 2024Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance Company - Insurer Innovation Award 2024
Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance Company - Insurer Innovation Award 2024
 
🐬 The future of MySQL is Postgres 🐘
🐬  The future of MySQL is Postgres   🐘🐬  The future of MySQL is Postgres   🐘
🐬 The future of MySQL is Postgres 🐘
 
Histor y of HAM Radio presentation slide
Histor y of HAM Radio presentation slideHistor y of HAM Radio presentation slide
Histor y of HAM Radio presentation slide
 
Boost PC performance: How more available memory can improve productivity
Boost PC performance: How more available memory can improve productivityBoost PC performance: How more available memory can improve productivity
Boost PC performance: How more available memory can improve productivity
 

Reimagining the Archive keynote presentation

  • 1. WE ARE THE NEW ARCHIVISTS: ARTISANS, ACTIVISTS, CINEPHILES, CITIZENS Rick Prelinger Reimagining the Archive UCLA, November 2010 Licensed under CC Attribution-Non-Commercial License Saturday, November 13, 2010
  • 2. Saturday, November 13, 2010 I’d like to begin by explaining that my talk focuses on issues relating to archives and archivists in the United States. We have not yet achieved the ambitious and audacious cultural heritage digitization projects that our colleagues in Europe have realized. These projects demand the cooperation and consensus of many stakeholders, including cultural ministries and rightsholders. American archival access and digitization projects tend perhaps to be more entrepreneurial, smaller-scale, sometimes even scrappy. Perhaps a fusion of approaches may come one day.
  • 3. 100 Reasons to Be Cheerful http://www.illuminationsmedia.co.uk/blog/index.cfm?start=1&news_id=872 Saturday, November 13, 2010 Earlier today at University College London the British arts TV producer John Wyver argued that this is a “golden age for the moving image.” Despite the difficulty in funding what he calls “creative and critical film,” he says “the possibilities are simply incredible now and in Britain for making, distributing, accessing, watching and using moving images from both the present and the past.” And he proposes “100 reasons to be cheerful,” which I reproduce above.
  • 4. Saturday, November 13, 2010 I cite John’s list (which of course he assembled through crowdsourcing) NOT to make us feel bad about all of the emergent materials we lack the resources and technology to collect, but RATHER to suggest that there’s a parallel excitement in the moving image archives world. I just got back from the AMIA conference in Philadelphia and was really encouraged by what's happening in our field. There's movement on some perennially unresolved issues, and many archivists and archival users are doing really exciting work.
  • 5. Saturday, November 13, 2010 Enclosure used to be the default condition of almost all archival moving images. This is no longer true. While we haven't made much progress toward changing anachronistic copyright laws, everyday practice is moving beyond outdated frameworks. The biggest change is that archives and archivists are trending access-positive -- many no longer seem to be seeking privileged perches offline. Part of this shift comes from self- examination, but there's also pressure from commercial services, funders who sometimes think a few years ahead of grantees, and awareness of what's going on in the other LAM sectors. Collections are slowly but surely being digitized and made accessible. So while the battle for universal access to archives isn't yet won, I found myself much more enthusiastic than I thought I'd be.
  • 6. Text David Rice, AMIA 2010 Saturday, November 13, 2010 We're also starting to see a trend away from archives simply relying on tools and services that were developed for other communities. We're developing our own hacker community -- a cadre of technically literate archivists and archivist- engineers who are building sophisticated tools.
  • 7. Saturday, November 13, 2010 And while moving image archives are still pretty hermetic compared to, let’s say, public libraries, we’re starting to see ways in which archives actively reach out to their users and the public and push materials in their direction. All of these developments bode well for us, I think.
  • 8. PARIS IN THE 1920S, OR MOSCOW IN THE 1920S? Saturday, November 13, 2010 But here's my question. Is this Paris in the 1920s, or Moscow in the 1920s? Is this an uninhibited efflorescence of ideas, projects, theories that will reverberate over decades to come, or is it a temporary bloom before a loss of imagination, a crisis of legitimacy, or even a clampdown?
  • 9. Saturday, November 13, 2010 To cut to the chase: there are those (including myself) who've predicted that most moving image archives will become irrelevant, maybe even obsolete, if we cannot shed our legacy mindsets and limitations, and if we can't mount a strong defense against our emerging competitors. Can we survive?
  • 10. Saturday, November 13, 2010 Let's see. I'm going to try to get to this by counterposing a basket of exciting developments against a wheelbarrow of inherited conditions that I think aren't so good, and we'll see where we stand. First, may we agree on one stipulation, at least for tonight:
  • 11. ENCLOSURE IS NO OPTION Saturday, November 13, 2010 By now this is an old idea, and I certainly don't want to deliver yet another free culture keynote. Resource constraints, rights anxieties, lack of acceptance by a print-centered world and the inhibitions of our legacy culture turned the moving image archives into a secret garden. Sometimes I feel as though we are among the last conservationists in an age of abundance, as if we’re trying to protect an untrodden wilderness from human encroachment. If this is true, and some of you may argue with this analogy, perhaps it’s time to turn secret gardens into national parks that are open to all.
  • 12. Saturday, November 13, 2010 When the YouTubes of the world propagate moving images by the billions every day, I’m driven to say that the precautionary principle is best applied homeopathically rather than across the board. So rather than arguing for archival openness for the nth time, I'm going to assume that we've collectively decided that we want to make archival material universally available to all. Cultural capital founds itself not upon scarcity but on abundance. I realize that there are many exceptions, and that funds are lacking. But let’s assume we’re trying.
  • 13. Saturday, November 13, 2010 What are some of the unexamined obstacles to this? Who are the new archivists and archival users who are going to make this happen? And what roles will we play? I'd like to try and describe some attributes of the emerging actor who is going to enable the pursuit of endless possibility. Let’s first get the obstacles out of the way.
  • 14. ARCHIVES: BIG OR SMALL Saturday, November 13, 2010
  • 15. Saturday, November 13, 2010 Thought experiment. If we can pretend for a moment that the emotional and cerebral intensity of a movie equals life, is archival footage [in all its authenticity, wonder and surprise] bigger than life, or is it smaller? You might never have asked this question, but I've thought about it a lot while making my movie Panorama Ephemera, while compiling the annual Lost Landscapes of San Francisco and Detroit shows, and especially while looking at raw archival material for my current film-in-progress.
  • 16. Saturday, November 13, 2010 Since I identify as an archivist, archival footage isn't just one of a number of elements in a story, it IS the story. The show starts for me when archival footage comes on screen. During documentaries, I find myself nodding out during talking heads and sitting up for archival material. Of course, I'm not an average viewer. Let me try saying this another way. Why does historical footage often seem to retreat into the background while contemporary imagery seizes the foreground? Why do historical images tend to appear smaller than life, while contemporary images often seem larger than life, hyperreal, more revved up?
  • 17. archival = cool, cerebral contemporary = warm, immersive simulation = near-infinite modalities Saturday, November 13, 2010 Archival footage feels immersive to archivists because we love it and have trained ourselves to meet it more than halfway. But to other kinds of viewers, I suspect that archival sequences might not always constitute the most compelling moments. Why does archival equal cool and cerebral while contemporary equals warm and immersive? And why would members of an audience already motivated to watch a historically-focused piece find actual historical footage less interesting than, let's say, a reenactment or even a simulation?
  • 18. Saturday, November 13, 2010 As I said, I've thought about these questions while looking at work I've made on a laptop projected on a big screen. And I started thinking about them again recently, while attending a lecture on 20th-century music by Alex Ross and Ethan Iverson. Specifically, I started to wonder why archival footage never gets to pull its own weight. Silent footage is almost always "enhanced" by sound effects. Music, often emotionally and intellectually invasive, overwhelms the images. We rarely see more than a few seconds of archival material without some kind of sweetening or overdetermination, the proverbial "spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down."
  • 19. Saturday, November 13, 2010 Why aren't the images enough by themselves? Is archival footage like a plate of unseasoned steamed zucchini? If archival material is considered too old-fashioned, too boring, too distancing to show, or alternatively, too familiar, this won’t enhance the destination appeal of archives. And I'd worry about that.
  • 20. Tunnel to Battery Construction 129, Hawk Hill, Marin Headlands, California Saturday, November 13, 2010 I think we might be moving into an era in which footage of historical events and situations may be more highly valued as reference material than as functioning elements of a work. While I'm sure we'll still see tons of archival footage on screen and on air, I think we're going to see many instances where historical images will simply function as templates for higher-production-value immersive dramatizations. Why use "old clips" when you can build more immersive sequences on the desktop?
  • 21. Saturday, November 13, 2010 Not that I’m against using archives to build simulations and artificial worlds. Such use, if inventive, could emulsify past and future in fascinating ways while generating lucrative invoices for financially pressed archives. But I wonder whether rejecting original documents in favor of hyperreal re-creations will marginalize us. If we are to avoid the devaluation of the historical document, we must try our best to defend the power of the original image. As archivist Pam Wintle once told me, "every frame is precious," and while our senses of cultural and historical value may vary over time, we have only one chance to document an event and infinite opportunities to reconstruct it as it never occurred.
  • 22. Saturday, November 13, 2010 I may be arguing from a rarefied position, but I'd worry if arguing for the legitimacy of the archival document became characterized as a rarefied position.
  • 23. DATA IS A LIABILITY, OR THE FALSE GOD OF MARKET VALUE Saturday, November 13, 2010 I was recently at THATCamp, an unconference that takes place all around the country focusing on the emergent digital humanities field. People were talking about metadata and the importance of describing raw information. An attendee who had previously worked at an unsuccessful geospatial data company explained what happened when the company closed down and its workers rushed to find new homes for its datasets. This, he told us, was very difficult, and it was harder because of the need to describe the contents and organization of the data. "Data," he said, "is a liability."
  • 24. Saturday, November 13, 2010 Now, all of us collect a lot of data. My little archives collects print materials; we collect smallgauge film; and, increasingly, collects both born-digital and digitized moving images and the associated metadata. Is collecting like a game of Hearts, where every gain is also a loss?
  • 25. Saturday, November 13, 2010 "Data is a liability." Most of us (especially those in the commercial sector) would describe data as an asset. But let's think historically. Does the value of data — and, by extension, the value of moving images, which are, after all, very rich data — fluctuate over time? And if moving images are also data -- albeit a rich form of data -- might we also say that moving images could become a liability? This would constitute a nearly unsoluble riddle for archives.
  • 26. 2010-11-08 Saturday, November 13, 2010 Before I lose you, let's take a moment to review what this week’s version of Wikipedia has to say about fair market value. "Fair market value (FMV) is an estimate of the market value of a property, based on what a knowledgeable, willing, and unpressured buyer would probably pay to a knowledgeable, willing, and unpressured seller.... An estimate of fair market value may be founded either on precedent or extrapolation."
  • 27. Saturday, November 13, 2010 OK, let's extrapolate a bit. With a few conspicuous exceptions, the price of 16mm and 35mm film on the collectors' market is dropping, except for a few categories — 35mm IB Tech prints of MGM musicals and home movies showing 1930s Europe, to pick a couple of examples. I see a slackening of the frenzy that once swept through eBay. Why collect film when you can collect DVDs or leech tens of thousands of torrents from the cloud? Fewer individuals seem to care about preserving their particular versions of the live theatrical experience.
  • 28. Saturday, November 13, 2010 On a more macro level, the large archives are filling up. While there are a few happy exceptions, there is less money and less room for large film acquisitions. While almost no one would dispute the "artistic, cultural and historical" value of moving image collections, their fair market value (such as it is) seems to be decreasing. Several large significant collections languished on the market for a long time before fortunately being acquired by large institutions, and there are still important collections that are hurting for homes. My sense is that this situation prevails in the audio and textual realms as well.
  • 29. Saturday, November 13, 2010 Film is becoming a liability, even as the images it contains become more sought after by more people. Fair market value has lost sync with cultural and historical value. I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that increasingly high-quality digitization will cause the sanctions against discarding original film (and certainly videotape) to disappear. Tape too will become a liability. First they came for the newspapers, then they came for the books, now for the films and tapes. (One day, of course, they'll come for the data.)
  • 30. Saturday, November 13, 2010 Tape is a liability. Film is a liability. These are incendiary statements. It might be more precise to say that "aging data is a liability," or that "old media is a liability." But just as a society should judge itself by how well it takes care of its most vulnerable members, we might similarly dedicate ourselves as archivists to collecting, preserving and providing access to moving images fixed in their native formats.
  • 31. Saturday, November 13, 2010 While I don't want to join the chorus of archivists (and journalists) who reflexively bemoan the loss of tangible assets, there's a real question here. It may well be that we should thin our film and tape holdings, and that digitization/deaccession may be appropriate or unavoidable in some cases. But that's a question for broad discussion. In the past, I've suggested that we take a leaf from the environmental movement and require "digitization impact statements" and "preservation impact statements" when we undertake grand projects, in order to better understand their broad cultural and historical impact. In any case, I don't think that decisions to migrate and destroy material should be made in private. While a single decision may seem trivial or obvious, the sum of many decisions will change history.
  • 32. Saturday, November 13, 2010 An aesthete would readily remark that fair market value is the enemy of culture. For archivists, fair market value may be the enemy of the historical record. We would do well to try to reformulate what kind of value matters for us and for the records we try to preserve, and what kind of sense of value we wish to inculcate in our public. Otherwise, the new will continue to discredit the old, and the archival mission will present to the public as an increasingly quixotic pursuit.
  • 33. WE STILL HAVE THE MATERIALS! Saturday, November 13, 2010 When we warn of the obsolescence of archives, there’s one thing we shouldn't forget. The world may be choked with free, degraded-resolution, decontextualized, poorly indexed, misidentified, sliced and diced moving images. But archives still hold the high-quality material, much of which is UNIQUE, and we know a lot about its context.
  • 34. Saturday, November 13, 2010 I think the case for the essentiality and authority of archives is strong. Alexander Horwath, David Francis, Paolo Cherchi-Usai and Michael Loebenstein discuss this at length in their fascinating conversation on film curatorship, published by the Austrian Film Museum. Unfortunately the book, which is excellent, is also permeated with a discourse of loss, and a suggestion that the propagation of scarcity is inherent in the ethical archivists’ work. I do not know how we will read it in twenty, or even five years from now.
  • 35. Saturday, November 13, 2010 I don’t believe that we’re faced with either/or alternatives as dramatic as we sometimes hear. Just as DVDs and online video haven’t killed off silent film culture (quite the opposite!), cellphone videos will not kill the theatrical experience. Ubiquitous distribution of archival films will not prevent people from meeting in big rooms to engage in collective experiences.
  • 36. Saturday, November 13, 2010 The retreat from public space that we see today -- the media rooms, the home theaters, the Netflix subscriptions -- won’t disappear, but it will coexist with shared experiences that involve either physical presence or enhanced virtual presence. It’s reductive and ahistorical to imagine that vectors of sociotechnological change move in a single direction, though it may make for more sensational press. Anyway, why shouldn't moving images (especially nontheatrical ones) flow freely through the culture? Books do. Photographs do. Music does. Soon templates that describe three- dimensional objects that are ready for printing at your local Kinko’s 3-D Maker Shop will, too. The introduction of each of these forms has been accompanied by contending business models, slippage and stealing, and moral panics. But we still have our manuscripts, incunabula, photographic prints and, for many of us, our LPs.
  • 37. Saturday, November 13, 2010 Do we want to repeat the kind of enclosure that's characteristic of art museums, who tend to try to control images of the works they hold? Is the digital object a precious object, or a devalued object? from the viewpoint of the archivist, surrogates are often "pictures of movies," in the same sense that art books contain pictures of artworks. From the viewpoint of the collector or cinephile, this is not clear. Some of us take the long plane ride to Pordenone while others of us collect DVDs. But I contend that new kinds of value are created when analog objects transmute into digital ones. The value that accrues when works propagate throughout the culture and alight here and there to grow roots. The value that multiples when new works are derived from old. The value that grows out of simple repetition – no one can contend that "Stairway to Heaven" is devalued by being played every 30 seconds somewhere on American radio.
  • 38. Saturday, November 13, 2010 Curatorship is often presented as the primary, irreducible function of archives. Well, OK. But will we be able to argue for the continued bundling of archival curatorship and collecting, storing and maintaining a physical collection? Can we demonstrate this to a world where millions of people have already become file managers? Will curators work in proximity to cans and reels? Or will moving image archives follow the lead of the production industry, which stashes original film elements underground and builds a staff of screengazers who maintain, manipulate and distribute digital surrogates? I have no immediate answer to this question, and it would be presumptuous to pretend I did.
  • 39. Saturday, November 13, 2010 But this debate cannot take place over our heads. We must define our interest and pursue it. The problem is that archives have often abdicated any control over the material they hold and tend to serve as surrogate gatekeepers for copyright holders who support archives as long as it’s convenient to do so. Archives need to define their own interest.
  • 40. ARTISANSHIP AND ACTIVISM Saturday, November 13, 2010 I am not as much of an artisan as many of you, but I love working with film. I have been working with amateur and home movies intensively for two years now. It has occupied far more of my time than I ever expected, and it has been very fulfilling.
  • 41. Saturday, November 13, 2010 But the laying on of hands, while essential and gratifying on so many levels, has become an accelerating road to marginality. Now that doesn't mean we should not be hands-on archivists –- we should just realize the limits of the artisanal role.
  • 42. Saturday, November 13, 2010 As we all know, artisanship has historically been challenged by technology and industrialization. And now almost every one of us has the capability to become a little Henry Ford, if we come up with a good idea. Today every laptop contains image-capture and image-editing tools and a link to the Internet. The painstaking work of film preservation and restoration is already being automated.
  • 43. Saturday, November 13, 2010 It is unlikely there will be paid work for all those who want to become artisans of media preservation. As analog workflows become the exception rather than the rule, preservation will unavoidably involve getting film to run through scanners as best as we can so that digital artists and file managers can do restoration on the desktop, using increasingly automated tools. Scribes gave way to copy clerks to typists to word processors to Microsoft Word. While we will still have our Bob Gitts and Mark Toscanos, it will be a rare project that can afford their concentration and skills.
  • 44. Saturday, November 13, 2010 I don’t want to see preservation slip away from us. Right now we need to figure out what the specificity of our field will be. And I think that if we’re going to do this, we need to look up from our benches and have a serious conversation. This is what atomic scientists tried to do after Hiroshima, to argue for world control over nuclear science and energy. Unfortunately, they lost. This is what programmers have done and continue to do, and it’s why we have a mixed economy of software, where some coders work in cubes for large enterprises while others work at home to build open- source apps and tools and derive a different kind of income.
  • 45. Saturday, November 13, 2010 Perhaps we need to take a cue from some of the young farmers who are populating both cities and the rural fringe. Some of the best of them (I'm thinking especially of the Greenhorns) see agriculture today as a neo-Jeffersonian pursuit – they see farming not simply as a means to produce good and healthy food, but as a practice that will generate not only food but ideas. At best they aspire to turn farmers into citizen intellectuals as they were in the early Federal period, and turn the countryside into an incubator for all kinds of ideas.
  • 46. Saturday, November 13, 2010 Can archival artisans step out of our quotidian, constrained experience and shoulder part of the responsibility for steering archives into the future? It would be wonderful.
  • 47. Saturday, November 13, 2010 Most moving image archives are accidental. Yes, the larger institutions were founded for that specific purpose, and there are specialized institutions that were born to preserve moving images. But most started collecting by accident and preserving out of necessity. And most archivists are latchkey children, working in isolation from the broader culture.
  • 48. Saturday, November 13, 2010 Archivists are in a unique position to experiment -- to question limits and boundaries that may no longer make sense to obey. As farmers are trying to construct a new food system, can archivists construct a new ecology of archives and archival material? The alternative is that this will be done for us without our involvement. I think of the research and public librarians who guarded hundreds of millions of volumes in vain. Data is a liability, and it’s possible the artisan archivist will also be a liability if he and she do not take an active part in proposing their future. It is up to archivists to be advocates for archives.
  • 49. Saturday, November 13, 2010 The other primary advocates, of course, will be archival users, who are archivists' greatest allies. Most institutions will not offer free, ubiquitous access to collections without a struggle. This doesn’t mean archivists are bad people -- but they are resource-poor, and second-guessed by a legacy culture. (Now, it may not be like this at UCLA or the Library of Congress, but check out your local historical society, a stock footage company, or a poorly funded university archives.) They need resources, and it may be up to the user to fight for the archives.
  • 50. Saturday, November 13, 2010 I'd love to work on a Young (and Old) Archivists handbook. anyone interested?
  • 51. CINEPHILIA AND CITIZENSHIP Saturday, November 13, 2010 Cinephilia is the condition uniting almost all of us who work in the moving image archives field. The objects of our desire may vary -- I’m fixated on amateur and home movies, and occasionally my eye strays towards sponsored films of exceptional virtue -- but we are just about all cinephiles.
  • 52. Saturday, November 13, 2010 There’s nothing particularly wrong with cinephilia. To some extent it motivates archivists to collect and preserve materials that might otherwise be at risk, and it’s one of the drivers of cinema culture. But all that said, I’m not sure it can motivate archivists (and archival users) towards assuming broader civic roles. Let me try to explain.
  • 53. Saturday, November 13, 2010 At this moment, archives and archival practice desperately need advocates. We are questioned, and actually threatened, from many directions. I don’t need to describe the fiscal constraints that archives have always endured, and which are especially tight right now. More fundamentally, most archives (whether publicly supported or not) are sustained out of a frequently unspoken consensus that we serve a valuable cultural and social function. We have had a hard time explaining this to funders, to those to whom we report, and to members of the public who don’t yet understand that we are not public libraries or YouTube. It is up to us to find new narratives for existing services at the same time we develop new ones.
  • 54. Saturday, November 13, 2010 I do not question devotion to the cinema, but this is the time to face outward. While archives have never been so popular nor so central to our culture, we’ve also never faced so many potentially destructive trends. Devotion will not prevent defunding. Cinephilia cannot stave off the forces of commercialization.
  • 55. 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... — Robert C. Binkley, 1939 Saturday, November 13, 2010 To cinephiles, I would counterpose the role of citizen archivists. I talked about this a few years back, suggesting that history, memory and cultural continuity were civic functions and that archivists should think of themselves as citizens with civic responsibilities. This could mean many things, but at minimum it indicates that archivists need to be advocates for their work and their institutions in the public sphere. The term was recently appropriated in a different sense by David Ferriero, the new AOTUS, when he suggested that the archival field should make more room for uncredentialed citizen volunteers. It created a little controversy.
  • 56. A PLACE OF ORIGIN Saturday, November 13, 2010
  • 57. Saturday, November 13, 2010 A couple of years ago I was walking down the street in Pittsburgh with Janet Céja, whom some of you may know. She was telling me how she’d tried to get her Cinema Studies students interested in archives, but they didn't care. I asked why, and she said "I guess they felt archives were the end of it all, the place where films go to die." This was a big a-ha moment for me, because I realized we’d all got things completely backwards. I thought, what if we reconceive the archive as a point of origin, as a birthplace for new works and a rebirthing venue for old works? If we think of the archive as an incubation point, suddenly a cloak of bad ideas starts to slip away.
  • 58. Saturday, November 13, 2010 Archives promise the possibility of a return to original, unmediated documents. I think this is part of their attraction to artists — the idea that we can touch and use archival records without also having to inherit the corrupting crust that they’ve accreted over time. This is an Edenic fantasy, but it can also be a productive point of origin.
  • 59. Saturday, November 13, 2010 Had I a single thing to say, it would be: exit the dark, come into the light. Legacy archival practices parallel those of legacy film spectatorship. Often solitary, certainly auratic, both rest upon the presumption that objects and experiences are incapable of near-infinite replication. These venerable practices will not disappear, but coexist with the new archival work...
  • 60. new archival practice: reaches out to current & potential audiences & users recognizes its effect within & upon the public sphere values open information, techniques, ethics, process rejects institutional, disciplinary, regional & community boundaries values the periphery as frontier, a birthplace of innovative ideas & practices Saturday, November 13, 2010 ...which needs to be SOCIAL. PUBLIC. TRANSPARENT. COLLABORATIVE AND DECENTRALIZED.
  • 61. Saturday, November 13, 2010 We have worked for too long in the background for too few clients. While we were working with studios, media producers, DVD distributors and the occasional scholar, archives went retail. The public started knocking on the doors, and much of the time we didn’t answer. We must instead turn ourselves into cultural producers.
  • 62. WHO ARE THE NEW ARCHIVISTS? Saturday, November 13, 2010
  • 63. Saturday, November 13, 2010 The new archivists will find new outlets for artisanal practices in the digital age. They will, I hope, find ways to be public advocates for themselves and their institutions.
  • 64. Saturday, November 13, 2010 The new archivists aren’t anti-technology, but deploy an amalgam of new and old technologies while trying to be mindful of how workflow may embody unexamined ideologies and controls.
  • 65. Saturday, November 13, 2010 The new archivists won’t shrink from advancing archival theory and practice. Archives shouldn’t only be repositories, but also workshops -- places where ideas originate and are tested, and centers for the development of tools, services and applications. One very concrete suggestion: archives might host unconferences like Code4Lib and THATCamp, which have both met in many locations and resulted in the development of actionable tools and ideas.
  • 66. Saturday, November 13, 2010 The new archivists are synthesists, remixers, mashers-up. They aren’t hesitant to find inspiration in other fields, whether it’s libraries, museums, the emerging digital humanities field, the tech community, maker culture, social activism, the art world, and even the food futurist movement.
  • 67. Saturday, November 13, 2010 The new archivists see themselves and their institutions not as terminal zones for dead media, but as cultural producers whose intervention in the media stream is as essential as anyone else’s. By pushing holdings out to the public, we can reinflect the present with the past and affect the future.
  • 68. PARIS IN THE 1920S, OR MOSCOW IN THE 1920S? Saturday, November 13, 2010 I ask again. Where does all of this leave us? And I will try to answer. I believe our prognosis will be determined by the degree of autonomy that we assert. If we can avoid asymmetric and unequal partnerships; if we can successfully advocate for our essentiality and specificity in an era when all forms of communication are being reduced to fungible bits; and if we can simultaneously be artisans, lovers of film and social beings, we will probably make it.
  • 69. Saturday, November 13, 2010 Information is becoming an entitlement, first in the developed world, but soon everywhere. The demand is insatiable, but so is the supply. And we can’t begin to imagine how much curators and contextualizers will be in demand. While machines will fulfill some of these functions, I don’t think people will be satisfied with computed curation. If we assert the value of our contributions, I think we’ll have more than 100 reasons to be cheerful.
  • 70. Photo: Jose Maria “Chema” Barredo Saturday, November 13, 2010 Culture, like water, small animals and seeds in the wind, is hard to enclose. But culture is also fragile. If we start to run into involuntary limits on our mobility, our metabolism, and our freedom to consume, it will be interesting to see what forms of cultural activity survive.

Hinweis der Redaktion

  1. I’d like to begin by explaining that my talk focuses on issues relating to archives and archivists in the United States. We have not yet achieved the ambitious and audacious cultural heritage digitization projects that our colleagues in Europe have realized. These projects demand the cooperation and consensus of many stakeholders, including cultural ministries and rightsholders. American archival access and digitization projects tend perhaps to be more entrepreneurial, smaller-scale, sometimes even scrappy. Perhaps a fusion of approaches may come one day.
  2. Earlier today at University College London the British arts TV producer John Wyver argued that this is a “golden age for the moving image.” Despite the difficulty in funding what he calls “creative and critical film,” he says “the possibilities are simply incredible now and in Britain for making, distributing, accessing, watching and using moving images from both the present and the past.” And he proposes “100 reasons to be cheerful,” which I reproduce above.
  3. I cite John’s list (which of course he assembled through crowdsourcing) NOT to make us feel bad about all of the emergent materials we lack the resources and technology to collect, but RATHER to suggest that there’s a parallel excitement in the moving image archives world. I just got back from the AMIA conference in Philadelphia and was really encouraged by what's happening in our field. There's movement on some perennially unresolved issues, and many archivists and archival users are doing really exciting work.
  4. Enclosure used to be the default condition of almost all archival moving images. This is no longer true. While we haven't made much progress toward changing anachronistic copyright laws, everyday practice is moving beyond outdated frameworks. The biggest change is that archives and archivists are trending access-positive -- many no longer seem to be seeking privileged perches offline. Part of this shift comes from self-examination, but there's also pressure from commercial services, funders who sometimes think a few years ahead of grantees, and awareness of what's going on in the other LAM sectors. Collections are slowly but surely being digitized and made accessible. So while the battle for universal access to archives isn't yet won, I found myself much more enthusiastic than I thought I'd be.
  5. We're also starting to see a trend away from archives simply relying on tools and services that were developed for other communities. We're developing our own hacker community -- a cadre of technically literate archivists and archivist-engineers who are building sophisticated tools.
  6. And while moving image archives are still pretty hermetic compared to, let’s say, public libraries, we’re starting to see ways in which archives actively reach out to their users and the public and push materials in their direction. All of these developments bode well for us, I think.
  7. But here's my question. Is this Paris in the 1920s, or Moscow in the 1920s? Is this an uninhibited efflorescence of ideas, projects, theories that will reverberate over decades to come, or is it a temporary bloom before a loss of imagination, a crisis of legitimacy, or even a clampdown?
  8. To cut to the chase: there are those (including myself) who've predicted that most moving image archives will become irrelevant, maybe even obsolete, if we cannot shed our legacy mindsets and limitations, and if we can't mount a strong defense against our emerging competitors. Can we survive?
  9. Let's see. I'm going to try to get to this by counterposing a basket of exciting developments against a wheelbarrow of inherited conditions that I think aren't so good, and we'll see where we stand. First, may we agree on one stipulation, at least for tonight:
  10. By now this is an old idea, and I certainly don't want to deliver yet another free culture keynote. Resource constraints, rights anxieties, lack of acceptance by a print-centered world and the inhibitions of our legacy culture turned the moving image archives into a secret garden. Sometimes I feel as though we are among the last conservationists in an age of abundance, as if we’re trying to protect an untrodden wilderness from human encroachment. If this is true, and some of you may argue with this analogy, perhaps it’s time to turn secret gardens into national parks that are open to all.
  11. When the YouTubes of the world propagate moving images by the billions every day, I’m driven to say that the precautionary principle is best applied homeopathically rather than across the board. So rather than arguing for archival openness for the nth time, I'm going to assume that we've collectively decided that we want to make archival material universally available to all. Cultural capital founds itself not upon scarcity but on abundance. I realize that there are many exceptions, and that funds are lacking. But let’s assume we’re trying.
  12. What are some of the unexamined obstacles to this? Who are the new archivists and archival users who are going to make this happen? And what roles will we play? I'd like to try and describe some attributes of the emerging actor who is going to enable the pursuit of endless possibility. Let’s first get the obstacles out of the way.
  13. Thought experiment. If we can pretend for a moment that the emotional and cerebral intensity of a movie equals life, is archival footage [in all its authenticity, wonder and surprise] bigger than life, or is it smaller? You might never have asked this question, but I've thought about it a lot while making my movie Panorama Ephemera, while compiling the annual Lost Landscapes of San Francisco and Detroit shows, and especially while looking at raw archival material for my current film-in-progress.
  14. Since I identify as an archivist, archival footage isn't just one of a number of elements in a story, it IS the story. The show starts for me when archival footage comes on screen. During documentaries, I find myself nodding out during talking heads and sitting up for archival material. Of course, I'm not an average viewer. Let me try saying this another way. Why does historical footage often seem to retreat into the background while contemporary imagery seizes the foreground? Why do historical images tend to appear smaller than life, while contemporary images often seem larger than life, hyperreal, more revved up?
  15. Archival footage feels immersive to archivists because we love it and have trained ourselves to meet it more than halfway. But to other kinds of viewers, I suspect that archival sequences might not always constitute the most compelling moments. Why does archival equal cool and cerebral while contemporary equals warm and immersive? And why would members of an audience already motivated to watch a historically-focused piece find actual historical footage less interesting than, let's say, a reenactment or even a simulation?
  16. As I said, I've thought about these questions while looking at work I've made on a laptop projected on a big screen. And I started thinking about them again recently, while attending a lecture on 20th-century music by Alex Ross and Ethan Iverson. Specifically, I started to wonder why archival footage never gets to pull its own weight. Silent footage is almost always "enhanced" by sound effects. Music, often emotionally and intellectually invasive, overwhelms the images. We rarely see more than a few seconds of archival material without some kind of sweetening or overdetermination, the proverbial "spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down."
  17. Why aren't the images enough by themselves? Is archival footage like a plate of unseasoned steamed zucchini? If archival material is considered too old-fashioned, too boring, too distancing to show, or alternatively, too familiar, this won’t enhance the destination appeal of archives. And I'd worry about that.
  18. I think we might be moving into an era in which footage of historical events and situations may be more highly valued as reference material than as functioning elements of a work. While I'm sure we'll still see tons of archival footage on screen and on air, I think we're going to see many instances where historical images will simply function as templates for higher-production-value immersive dramatizations. Why use "old clips" when you can build more immersive sequences on the desktop?
  19. Not that I’m against using archives to build simulations and artificial worlds. Such use, if inventive, could emulsify past and future in fascinating ways while generating lucrative invoices for financially pressed archives. But I wonder whether rejecting original documents in favor of hyperreal re-creations will marginalize us. If we are to avoid the devaluation of the historical document, we must try our best to defend the power of the original image. As archivist Pam Wintle once told me, "every frame is precious," and while our senses of cultural and historical value may vary over time, we have only one chance to document an event and infinite opportunities to reconstruct it as it never occurred.
  20. I may be arguing from a rarefied position, but I'd worry if arguing for the legitimacy of the archival document became characterized as a rarefied position.
  21. I was recently at THATCamp, an unconference that takes place all around the country focusing on the emergent digital humanities field. People were talking about metadata and the importance of describing raw information. An attendee who had previously worked at an unsuccessful geospatial data company explained what happened when the company closed down and its workers rushed to find new homes for its datasets. This, he told us, was very difficult, and it was harder because of the need to describe the contents and organization of the data. "Data," he said, "is a liability."
  22. Now, all of us collect a lot of data. My little archives collects print materials; we collect smallgauge film; and, increasingly, collects both born-digital and digitized moving images and the associated metadata. Is collecting like a game of Hearts, where every gain is also a loss?
  23. "Data is a liability." Most of us (especially those in the commercial sector) would describe data as an asset. But let's think historically. Does the value of data — and, by extension, the value of moving images, which are, after all, very rich data — fluctuate over time? And if moving images are also data -- albeit a rich form of data -- might we also say that moving images could become a liability? This would constitute a nearly unsoluble riddle for archives.
  24. Before I lose you, let's take a moment to review what this week’s version of Wikipedia has to say about fair market value. "Fair market value (FMV) is an estimate of the market value of a property, based on what a knowledgeable, willing, and unpressured buyer would probably pay to a knowledgeable, willing, and unpressured seller.... An estimate of fair market value may be founded either on precedent or extrapolation."
  25. OK, let's extrapolate a bit. With a few conspicuous exceptions, the price of 16mm and 35mm film on the collectors' market is dropping, except for a few categories — 35mm IB Tech prints of MGM musicals and home movies showing 1930s Europe, to pick a couple of examples. I see a slackening of the frenzy that once swept through eBay. Why collect film when you can collect DVDs or leech tens of thousands of torrents from the cloud? Fewer individuals seem to care about preserving their particular versions of the live theatrical experience.
  26. On a more macro level, the large archives are filling up. While there are a few happy exceptions, there is less money and less room for large film acquisitions. While almost no one would dispute the "artistic, cultural and historical" value of moving image collections, their fair market value (such as it is) seems to be decreasing. Several large significant collections languished on the market for a long time before fortunately being acquired by large institutions, and there are still important collections that are hurting for homes. My sense is that this situation prevails in the audio and textual realms as well.
  27. Film is becoming a liability, even as the images it contains become more sought after by more people. Fair market value has lost sync with cultural and historical value. I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that increasingly high-quality digitization will cause the sanctions against discarding original film (and certainly videotape) to disappear. Tape too will become a liability. First they came for the newspapers, then they came for the books, now for the films and tapes. (One day, of course, they'll come for the data.)
  28. Tape is a liability. Film is a liability. These are incendiary statements. It might be more precise to say that "aging data is a liability," or that "old media is a liability." But just as a society should judge itself by how well it takes care of its most vulnerable members, we might similarly dedicate ourselves as archivists to collecting, preserving and providing access to moving images fixed in their native formats.
  29. While I don't want to join the chorus of archivists (and journalists) who reflexively bemoan the loss of tangible assets, there's a real question here. It may well be that we should thin our film and tape holdings, and that digitization/deaccession may be appropriate or unavoidable in some cases. But that's a question for broad discussion. In the past, I've suggested that we take a leaf from the environmental movement and require "digitization impact statements" and "preservation impact statements" when we undertake grand projects, in order to better understand their broad cultural and historical impact. In any case, I don't think that decisions to migrate and destroy material should be made in private. While a single decision may seem trivial or obvious, the sum of many decisions will change history.
  30. An aesthete would readily remark that fair market value is the enemy of culture. For archivists, fair market value may be the enemy of the historical record. We would do well to try to reformulate what kind of value matters for us and for the records we try to preserve, and what kind of sense of value we wish to inculcate in our public. Otherwise, the new will continue to discredit the old, and the archival mission will present to the public as an increasingly quixotic pursuit.
  31. When we warn of the obsolescence of archives, there’s one thing we shouldn't forget. The world may be choked with free, degraded-resolution, decontextualized, poorly indexed, misidentified, sliced and diced moving images. But archives still hold the high-quality material, much of which is UNIQUE, and we know a lot about its context.
  32. I think the case for the essentiality and authority of archives is strong. Alexander Horwath, David Francis, Paolo Cherchi-Usai and Michael Loebenstein discuss this at length in their fascinating conversation on film curatorship, published by the Austrian Film Museum. Unfortunately the book, which is excellent, is also permeated with a discourse of loss, and a suggestion that the propagation of scarcity is inherent in the ethical archivists’ work. I do not know how we will read it in twenty, or even five years from now.
  33. I don’t believe that we’re faced with either/or alternatives as dramatic as we sometimes hear. Just as DVDs and online video haven’t killed off silent film culture (quite the opposite!), cellphone videos will not kill the theatrical experience. Ubiquitous distribution of archival films will not prevent people from meeting in big rooms to engage in collective experiences.
  34. The retreat from public space that we see today -- the media rooms, the home theaters, the Netflix subscriptions -- won’t disappear, but it will coexist with shared experiences that involve either physical presence or enhanced virtual presence. It’s reductive and ahistorical to imagine that vectors of sociotechnological change move in a single direction, though it may make for more sensational press. Anyway, why shouldn't moving images (especially nontheatrical ones) flow freely through the culture? Books do. Photographs do. Music does. Soon templates that describe three-dimensional objects that are ready for printing at your local Kinko’s 3-D Maker Shop will, too. The introduction of each of these forms has been accompanied by contending business models, slippage and stealing, and moral panics. But we still have our manuscripts, incunabula, photographic prints and, for many of us, our LPs.
  35. Do we want to repeat the kind of enclosure that's characteristic of art museums, who tend to try to control images of the works they hold? Is the digital object a precious object, or a devalued object? from the viewpoint of the archivist, surrogates are often "pictures of movies," in the same sense that art books contain pictures of artworks. From the viewpoint of the collector or cinephile, this is not clear. Some of us take the long plane ride to Pordenone while others of us collect DVDs. But I contend that new kinds of value are created when analog objects transmute into digital ones. The value that accrues when works propagate throughout the culture and alight here and there to grow roots. The value that multiples when new works are derived from old. The value that grows out of simple repetition – no one can contend that "Stairway to Heaven" is devalued by being played every 30 seconds somewhere on American radio.
  36. Curatorship is often presented as the primary, irreducible function of archives. Well, OK. But will we be able to argue for the continued bundling of archival curatorship and collecting, storing and maintaining a physical collection? Can we demonstrate this to a world where millions of people have already become file managers? Will curators work in proximity to cans and reels? Or will moving image archives follow the lead of the production industry, which stashes original film elements underground and builds a staff of screengazers who maintain, manipulate and distribute digital surrogates? I have no immediate answer to this question, and it would be presumptuous to pretend I did.
  37. But this debate cannot take place over our heads. We must define our interest and pursue it. The problem is that archives have often abdicated any control over the material they hold and tend to serve as surrogate gatekeepers for copyright holders who support archives as long as it’s convenient to do so. Archives need to define their own interest.
  38. I am not as much of an artisan as many of you, but I love working with film. I have been working with amateur and home movies intensively for two years now. It has occupied far more of my time than I ever expected, and it has been very fulfilling.
  39. But the laying on of hands, while essential and gratifying on so many levels, has become an accelerating road to marginality. Now that doesn't mean we should not be hands-on archivists –- we should just realize the limits of the artisanal role.
  40. As we all know, artisanship has historically been challenged by technology and industrialization. And now almost every one of us has the capability to become a little Henry Ford, if we come up with a good idea. Today every laptop contains image-capture and image-editing tools and a link to the Internet. The painstaking work of film preservation and restoration is already being automated.
  41. It is unlikely there will be paid work for all those who want to become artisans of media preservation. As analog workflows become the exception rather than the rule, preservation will unavoidably involve getting film to run through scanners as best as we can so that digital artists and file managers can do restoration on the desktop, using increasingly automated tools. Scribes gave way to copy clerks to typists to word processors to Microsoft Word. While we will still have our Bob Gitts and Mark Toscanos, it will be a rare project that can afford their concentration and skills.
  42. I don’t want to see preservation slip away from us. Right now we need to figure out what the specificity of our field will be. And I think that if we’re going to do this, we need to look up from our benches and have a serious conversation. This is what atomic scientists tried to do after Hiroshima, to argue for world control over nuclear science and energy. Unfortunately, they lost. This is what programmers have done and continue to do, and it’s why we have a mixed economy of software, where some coders work in cubes for large enterprises while others work at home to build open-source apps and tools and derive a different kind of income.
  43. Perhaps we need to take a cue from some of the young farmers who are populating both cities and the rural fringe. Some of the best of them (I'm thinking especially of the Greenhorns) see agriculture today as a neo-Jeffersonian pursuit – they see farming not simply as a means to produce good and healthy food, but as a practice that will generate not only food but ideas. At best they aspire to turn farmers into citizen intellectuals as they were in the early Federal period, and turn the countryside into an incubator for all kinds of ideas.
  44. Can archival artisans step out of our quotidian, constrained experience and shoulder part of the responsibility for steering archives into the future? It would be wonderful.
  45. Most moving image archives are accidental. Yes, the larger institutions were founded for that specific purpose, and there are specialized institutions that were born to preserve moving images. But most started collecting by accident and preserving out of necessity. And most archivists are latchkey children, working in isolation from the broader culture.
  46. Archivists are in a unique position to experiment -- to question limits and boundaries that may no longer make sense to obey. As farmers are trying to construct a new food system, can archivists construct a new ecology of archives and archival material? The alternative is that this will be done for us without our involvement. I think of the research and public librarians who guarded hundreds of millions of volumes in vain. Data is a liability, and it’s possible the artisan archivist will also be a liability if he and she do not take an active part in proposing their future. It is up to archivists to be advocates for archives.
  47. The other primary advocates, of course, will be archival users, who are archivists' greatest allies. Most institutions will not offer free, ubiquitous access to collections without a struggle. This doesn’t mean archivists are bad people -- but they are resource-poor, and second-guessed by a legacy culture. (Now, it may not be like this at UCLA or the Library of Congress, but check out your local historical society, a stock footage company, or a poorly funded university archives.) They need resources, and it may be up to the user to fight for the archives.
  48. I'd love to work on a Young (and Old) Archivists handbook. anyone interested?
  49. Cinephilia is the condition uniting almost all of us who work in the moving image archives field. The objects of our desire may vary -- I’m fixated on amateur and home movies, and occasionally my eye strays towards sponsored films of exceptional virtue -- but we are just about all cinephiles.
  50. There’s nothing particularly wrong with cinephilia. To some extent it motivates archivists to collect and preserve materials that might otherwise be at risk, and it’s one of the drivers of cinema culture. But all that said, I’m not sure it can motivate archivists (and archival users) towards assuming broader civic roles. Let me try to explain.
  51. At this moment, archives and archival practice desperately need advocates. We are questioned, and actually threatened, from many directions. I don’t need to describe the fiscal constraints that archives have always endured, and which are especially tight right now. More fundamentally, most archives (whether publicly supported or not) are sustained out of a frequently unspoken consensus that we serve a valuable cultural and social function. We have had a hard time explaining this to funders, to those to whom we report, and to members of the public who don’t yet understand that we are not public libraries or YouTube. It is up to us to find new narratives for existing services at the same time we develop new ones.
  52. I do not question devotion to the cinema, but this is the time to face outward. While archives have never been so popular nor so central to our culture, we’ve also never faced so many potentially destructive trends. Devotion will not prevent defunding. Cinephilia cannot stave off the forces of commercialization.
  53. To cinephiles, I would counterpose the role of citizen archivists. I talked about this a few years back, suggesting that history, memory and cultural continuity were civic functions and that archivists should think of themselves as citizens with civic responsibilities. This could mean many things, but at minimum it indicates that archivists need to be advocates for their work and their institutions in the public sphere. The term was recently appropriated in a different sense by David Ferriero, the new AOTUS, when he suggested that the archival field should make more room for uncredentialed citizen volunteers. It created a little controversy.
  54. A couple of years ago I was walking down the street in Pittsburgh with Janet Céja, whom some of you may know. She was telling me how she’d tried to get her Cinema Studies students interested in archives, but they didn't care. I asked why, and she said "I guess they felt archives were the end of it all, the place where films go to die." This was a big a-ha moment for me, because I realized we’d all got things completely backwards. I thought, what if we reconceive the archive as a point of origin, as a birthplace for new works and a rebirthing venue for old works? If we think of the archive as an incubation point, suddenly a cloak of bad ideas starts to slip away.
  55. Archives promise the possibility of a return to original, unmediated documents. I think this is part of their attraction to artists — the idea that we can touch and use archival records without also having to inherit the corrupting crust that they’ve accreted over time. This is an Edenic fantasy, but it can also be a productive point of origin.
  56. Had I a single thing to say, it would be: exit the dark, come into the light. Legacy archival practices parallel those of legacy film spectatorship. Often solitary, certainly auratic, both rest upon the presumption that objects and experiences are incapable of near-infinite replication. These venerable practices will not disappear, but coexist with the new archival work...
  57. ...which needs to be SOCIAL. PUBLIC. TRANSPARENT. COLLABORATIVE AND DECENTRALIZED.
  58. We have worked for too long in the background for too few clients. While we were working with studios, media producers, DVD distributors and the occasional scholar, archives went retail. The public started knocking on the doors, and much of the time we didn’t answer. We must instead turn ourselves into cultural producers.
  59. The new archivists will find new outlets for artisanal practices in the digital age. They will, I hope, find ways to be public advocates for themselves and their institutions.
  60. The new archivists aren’t anti-technology, but deploy an amalgam of new and old technologies while trying to be mindful of how workflow may embody unexamined ideologies and controls.
  61. The new archivists won’t shrink from advancing archival theory and practice. Archives shouldn’t only be repositories, but also workshops -- places where ideas originate and are tested, and centers for the development of tools, services and applications. One very concrete suggestion: archives might host unconferences like Code4Lib and THATCamp, which have both met in many locations and resulted in the development of actionable tools and ideas.
  62. The new archivists are synthesists, remixers, mashers-up. They aren’t hesitant to find inspiration in other fields, whether it’s libraries, museums, the emerging digital humanities field, the tech community, maker culture, social activism, the art world, and even the food futurist movement.
  63. The new archivists see themselves and their institutions not as terminal zones for dead media, but as cultural producers whose intervention in the media stream is as essential as anyone else’s. By pushing holdings out to the public, we can reinflect the present with the past and affect the future.
  64. I ask again. Where does all of this leave us? And I will try to answer. I believe our prognosis will be determined by the degree of autonomy that we assert. If we can avoid asymmetric and unequal partnerships; if we can successfully advocate for our essentiality and specificity in an era when all forms of communication are being reduced to fungible bits; and if we can simultaneously be artisans, lovers of film and social beings, we will probably make it.
  65. Information is becoming an entitlement, first in the developed world, but soon everywhere. The demand is insatiable, but so is the supply. And we can’t begin to imagine how much curators and contextualizers will be in demand. While machines will fulfill some of these functions, I don’t think people will be satisfied with computed curation. If we assert the value of our contributions, I think we’ll have more than 100 reasons to be cheerful.
  66. Culture, like water, small animals and seeds in the wind, is hard to enclose. But culture is also fragile. If we start to run into involuntary limits on our mobility, our metabolism, and our freedom to consume, it will be interesting to see what forms of cultural activity survive.