Editorial Type:
Article Category: Review Article
 | 
Online Publication Date: 01 Sept 2018

Moving Image and Sound Collections for Archivists

Page Range: 548 – 552
DOI: 10.17723/0360-9081-81.2.548
Save
Download PDF
By
Anthony Cocciolo
Chicago
Society of American Archivists
2017 224
pp. Softcover, PDF, and EPUB. Members
$49.99
nonmembers
$69.99
Softcover ISBN
978-0-931828-93-5
PDF ISBN
978-0-931828-95-9
EPUB ISBN
978-1-945246-02-9

Anthony Cocciolo's new book, Moving Image and Sound Collections for Archivists, could not have been published at a better time. Though institutions and individuals have been devoted to preserving audio recordings, films, videotapes, and video games for decades, their efforts have been somewhat at the margins of the library and archives fields. The skills and knowledge needed for the care of these formats have often been developed and transferred in a parallel stream to more traditional forms of archival training. There is now, however, a new interest in nonpaper formats from a wider range of collecting institutions due to a growing awareness of the significant conservation needs of analog and digital media, and an increased use of archival audiovisual (A/V) recordings by scholars, teachers, filmmakers and artists, and the general public. Despite this, librarians and archivists schooled in caring for manuscripts and rare books may not have the skillset needed to identify, prioritize, reformat, and create access to the important recordings in their collections.

This book meets these needs. Moving Image and Sound Collections for Archivists is an invaluable resource for beginners. Moreover, experienced audiovisual archivists would benefit from reading Cocciolo's book for his implicit argument that the best practices of media preservation need to be scaled to fit the abilities and budgets of smaller and nonspecialist collecting institutions.

Cocciolo is an associate professor at the Pratt Institute School of Information, where he also serves as dean. Media preservation is one part of his teaching and research activities. He has taught and published on archives management and theory, digital preservation, online communities, and community archiving. As such, the language and tone of the book are more accessible to a general audience, than, say, if a film archivist was addressing nonaudiovisual specialists. The course he teaches on media preservation, Projects in Moving Image and Sound Archives, takes a similar approach to working with non-A/V-specific organizations. It focuses on a project in which students access, digitize, and make accessible a subset of an audiovisual collection from a local community archives, the Lesbian Herstory Archives.1 These two characteristics—placing media preservation in the center of the archival field and making it an activity in which any archives can participate—permeate the book and are among its strengths.

Moving Image and Sound Collections for Archivists is split into two main sections: “Archival Practices for Moving Image and Sound Collections” and “Format-Specific Guidance.” After a short introduction, chapters 1 through 6 cover topics relevant to any audiovisual archives regardless of the formats in its collections: appraisal, description, legal and ethical concerns, digital preservation, access, and donor relations. These chapters are worth reading for anyone regardless of background or experience. Cocciolo places these topics within traditional archival frameworks while also adapting them to cover the specific needs of moving images and recorded sound.

This expansion of archival theory and practice is at its most productive in chapter 1, “Appraisal and Reappraisal.” Here, Cocciolo summarizes traditional approaches to appraisal with the few writings about the topic specific to audio, film, and video. He expands on these discussions by arguing for an additional round of appraisal for moving image and sound collections, which is not just deciding to keep a film print or audio recording but, as is described on page 17, “keeping in what form.” Digitizing A/V media, especially film and video, is expensive and creates huge files; collection managers might choose to reformat a moving image work to a lower-quality digital version depending on its value, content, and intended use.

The other chapters in this first section are at their best when they provide helpful advice on the central decisions archivists need to make when caring for collections and give examples of easily accessible platforms and tools they might use for providing online access. For example, chapter 2, “Accessioning, Arrangement, and Description,” offers guidance on when to catalog media holdings at a collection or item level. The next chapter on “Legal and Ethical Issues” includes a sample donation agreement for donors. Chapter 5, “Access and Outreach,” evaluates the pros and cons of using everyday websites such as SoundCloud and YouTube; and in chapter 6 Cocciolo lists tips archivists can offer media producers to care for their own productions.

Each of these chapters concludes with one or more examples of how a collecting institution has addressed the chapter's topic. These examples—from places such as the Archives of Emerson College and the Marist Archives at the Society of Mary in Wellington, New Zealand—are enjoyable to read for the innovative ways working archivists are overcoming the challenges of A/V preservation. That these are often localized solutions points to the book's arguments that no one-size-fits-all approach to media archiving exists and that can be achieved on a smaller budget.

Each chapter in the second half of the book (chapters 7 through 11) focus on a different medium or format: audio, film, analog video, digital video, and “complex media.” The chapters include a very condensed history of their respective media, ways to identify the media's primary and less-common formats and gauges, and techniques for digitization. Numerous pictures, charts, and screen grabs help identify items and show how to use digitization software. At their most helpful, these chapters synthesize the knowledge Cocciolo has gathered together from other resources on A/V preservation and his own experience with digitization projects for community archives and art museums. For example, he provides useful advice on the types of analog-to-digital converters to use for audio digitization in chapter 7. Cocciolo's recommendation to do “side-by-side testing” of a digitized video file alongside the original on a cathode ray tube monitor in chapter 9 is a great suggestion; when getting archival media digitized you should always check the new digital file against the source material played on its original playback technology to judge the quality of the reformatting work.

While chapter 8, “Film Collections,” provides such practical information as how to identify different gauges and a film's base, this medium is a bit underserved compared to the chapters on audio and video. This may be because low-cost but still fairly high-quality do-it-yourself types of digitization is less possible with film than it is with audio and video. This is understandable, but more information on dealing with film labs or grants for photochemical film preservation would have been helpful to include. Alternately, the chapter on complex media (chapter 11)—here meaning everything from CD-ROMs, creating workstations to transfer obsolete computer storage devices, techniques for emulating older operating systems, recording ephemeral websites, as well as smartphone apps and video games—covers a great deal of information, perhaps even too much when considering the shorter length of these chapters. Even so, the information is useful, and the call to “embrace nontraditional solutions, like crowd-source emulators” (p. 177) points to Cocciolo's democratic approach to media preservation.

The issues with these two chapters point to the very real problem of scale when discussing moving image and sound preservation to a general audience. How in-depth do you go? How many different formats do you include? How technical do you get? Where is the tipping point between including everything beginners need to know without overwhelming them? The difficulty of answering these questions must surely be compounded when publishing a book with an affordable page limit. For example, any one of the chapters in the second half could be expanded into a book. An expert in the preservation of one of these media might propose a different approach, or find specifics with which to debate, but the book follows the task Cocciolo sets out for himself in the introduction, which is to cover this highly technical, and, at times arcane, world of media preservation, for a general audience.

A too-brief epilogue concludes the book with Cocciolo's opinions on the increasing importance of media collections to the future of archiving. Online access to video and audio through platforms such as YouTube has shifted audiences' attention from the written text to moving images and recorded sound. Archivists must work to contextualize the vast, underdescribed mass of archival recordings that circulate online. These arguments work as a justification for why more cultural heritage workers should be concerned with audiovisual formats. This is a call for a newly engaged public role for archivists, and these topics deserve to be debated in their own right outside of this book.

Moving Image and Sound Collections for Archivists is a starting point. Each chapter gives beginners enough to start tackling the audio recordings, film prints, and videotapes they find mixed in with their other collections. Special collections curators working with manuscripts, family historians, community archivists, and media producers will find much of value in this book. It is a handy companion piece to the growing number of specialized online training tools for audiovisual archiving, including webinar series by the Association of Moving Image Archivists and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, and websites that assist with the identification and prioritization of archival media holdings, including FilmCare.org, the Bay Area Video Coalition's A/V Compass, and the University of Illinois's Preservation Self-Assessment Program.2

This book is also recommended for archivists and librarians who are more experienced with caring for legacy media collections. Within this helpful guidebook for beginners, Cocciolo has included a provocative argument about how media preservation is practiced and taught.

Copyright: © The Society of American Archivists, 2018. All Rights Reserved.
  • Download PDF