SEAPAVAA
RAMBLINGS

BY JIM LINDNER

Greetings colleagues. Unfortunately I am unable to be at your meeting in person due to a conflict with the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas. I was very disappointed when I realized this at the last minute because I was greatly looking forward to attending your meeting.

Both Ray and Mary were kind enough to ask me to submit a paper – and I suppose this is it – although it is a bit unconventional – as you would expect coming from me. As I was thinking what I would like to write about, a hundred different things came to mind – and when that type of profound confusion happens one is left with nothing. Sort of like an excellent meal where everything is so good it is difficult to single out a specific dish to compliment... and as I pondered this, I decided to write about just this – the issue of SO MUCH going on, and what archives should or should not do about it.

This is a difficult matter. There are so many new technologies, so many new ideas, and so many capabilities that did not exist a year ago. This has been an important year for the archive because so many new people have suddenly gotten interested in what archives are, and many have developed "instant cures" without even knowing what the problems are. In some cases it is technological arrogance or ignorance, but most often they are legitimate cures looking for illnesses.

Why have so many new ideas and products suddenly appeared, and what to do about them – particularly in archives with limited financial resources? One year ago brand new companies were discussing media asset management systems and showing demonstration software. Now people have tried some of it and some are at the beginning of projects to bring their media assets under control using these new technologies. At VidiPax for instance we have received contracts from IBM, AT&T and Coca-Cola to initiate projects of this type. Amazingly CORPORATE archives have become the first to try to adopt the new technology. This is a great surprise (to me at least) because these departments formerly were not given much visibility in large corporations, but now have large projects under way. Why has this happened? Where are the new sources of funding coming from?

It seems to me that the money for funding preservation has come from the need to access the material. Access – who would have thought that access would have brought more technology and money into the field? You may say that it is obvious – but to me at least, access was always something that traveled WITH preservation more or less hand in hand. After all if you did not have any money for preservation you did not have money for access either. Oh yes, there were always the small fee that archives charge the patron for the miscellaneous project, but that was never BIG money. We are now talking about BIG money entering the field. How big? Well this week Sony and IBM announced a joint project to migrate 100,000 hours of content to servers at CNN. RAI Italian Television has a similar project to migrate some 400,000 hours of content to servers. Even individual production companies that have large collections are doing it – like Childrens Television Workshop in New York who is migrating part of their collection to support their production of new programs.

Yes, the new steam engine for archives is ACCESS, and this is clearly a trend for the coming few years. People are realizing that the content in their archives actually has value, and can have more value if they can do something with it – and they can only do something to it if they know what they have in the first place. This may seem obvious, but many have viewed archives as repositories of OLD things – not a place to make new things and certainly not a place to make money with. In media companies, the incentive to going to servers is to get access to the content that is there but is hidden – making new shows out of old stuff, or using the new stuff in many different ways.

In the past when a wildlife photographer went out to take shots of animals it was for a particular production. For example a show on bird migration would require a shot of baby birds hatching. This was part of telling that particular story in that particular production. That is all changing. Now the idea is to get the shot of the baby bird and use it for a production on bird migration, but also make a new show on "Birds and Man: The struggle for the environment" as well as "Babies in the forest: young animals in the spring" and of course "Animal predators – how they feed their young". You get the idea. Now of course one could say that we could ALWAYS have done that – and this is true – but the new angle on all of this is that the new technologies make it very easy and cheap to do it. Making new shows will not cost as much money because more raw content already exist and is accessible. That means saving money and making more product less expensively, and THIS is something that attracts financial attention in some places.

The scary part in all of this is that it is clear that decisions are being made solely for the convenience of access, and real preservation issues are swept aside by both the vendors of these systems as well as the people who are specifying them. They are being swept aside because these issues are not widely understood, and as well because the preservation issues are not in alignment with the goal of access. That is to say that things do not necessarily have to be preserved when they are put on a server – people assume that the mere act of digitizing them and putting them on the server is preserving the content. And these, dear friends, is a very important issue that we must stand up to.

Technology is very much an enabler of new things, but one must understand the many implications of new technology before jumping into it. I fear that in the future there will be tremendous loss of our AV heritage by the rush to digitize. We are now at the FIRST digital migration path – certainly not the last. This is an area that is changing at lightning speed. So I strongly urge that one carefully consider the preservation of materials WITH the migration to server technology. Let access be the coal in the steam engine, but do not forget how it got there in the first place. Without proper preservation there will be no access for the future.

So how does this all impact your small collection? I know those of you in the room listening to this are saying that you will NEVER be able to afford this technology. Well a few points. Many other archivists thought the same thing a year or two ago, and all of a sudden things changed by the seemingly compulsive imperative to digitize everything. These days it sometimes seems that if you do not have everything on the Web that you are doing something terribly wrong. For many, all of a sudden money showed up to do things – provided that the things that were being done were for access. In some ways I think that the small underfunded archive may have a better chance of preserving the collection because there will not be a precipitous jump to new technology that is not really ready yet. So perhaps my message here is to feel that the slow way is sometimes the better way, and that trying to be in the middle of all of the new technology right now is a bit like being in the middle of a Tornado. I suggest that you let the winds calm a bit before judging what you should do.