Distinctive to this project was the commitment to select, digitize, and offer archival moving images explicitly as unedited texts and as shorter digital learning objects, using standards-based metadata tools and attached contextual and interpretive works.
In our forthcoming white paper we express an approach we believe appropriate for treating moving images with integrity as primary source materials for the humanities.
Moving image archives, special collections, and specialty libraries have the opportunity to provide access to detailed background information gained from the donor and from other sources. This project demonstrates a work flow starting with analog objects (16mm film), creating digital representations in varied formats, selecting learning objects from the digital representations, publishing those selections as digital clips, and making related interpretive materials in hard media and electronic form.
Along the way we identify and test metadata appropriate to the originating archives and to the user community using Encoded Archival Description for top-level description of NHF Collections, PBCore for individual works and their instantiations, TEI for textual objects, and METS for unified description of the digital works.
The project was formed with two target audiences for the online products
- Classroom teachers participating in the China history programs led by Primary Source,
- College students in East Asia and world history classes.
Working with specific audiences in mind provides many benefits: the engagement of end-users in the development process, incorporation of relevant content, and testing of structural and content premises. Each audience was represented on the team by intermediary professionals and humanities scholars: librarians, graduate students and curriculum developers preparing materials for secondary level social studies teachers, and professors of East Asian Studies teaching college students.
From the NHF archives we selected the Charles Gilbert Collection and the Joan Branch Collection, from which we drew only China-related footage from the many thousands of original 16mm feet. Determining the relation of thematic research collections to an EAD finding aid, and useful incorporation of moving images within a large finding aid, are important challenges for repositories.
In the phases following this digital startup, we would like to engage with others developing detailed methods and rationales for video in mixed collections and in audiovisual repositories. The William S. Cohen Finding Aid at the University of Maine models methods of dealing with audiovisual materials and electronic surrogates in a traditional, if supercharged, use of the EAD standard. Paige Lilly from the William S. Cohen Papers at the Fogler Library, University of Maine, served as metadata consultant on this project.
Northeast Historic Film is located at the 1916 Alamo Theatre in Bucksport, Maine. Karan Sheldon, NHF co-founder, is project director for Finding and Using Moving Images in Context.