Determining how to scale digital moving image access is challenging for custodians already stretched to serve their clients. The learning curve couldn’t be steeper, staff and volunteers are already stressed, and the ground shifts daily. Working deeply in your own ground while sharing widely is the course for meaningful archival moving image survival. The contexts for these films–found largely in the communities where they were created–must be recorded and shared starting at home. But as with films by North Americans shot in China, larger meaning must come from worldwide access.
At the Association of Moving Image Archivists annual conference in Rochester (Sept 26-28) the Regional Audiovisual Archivists presented a panel, “Preservation and Access Initiatives Within and Between Regions,” attended by 75+ people. I brought up the NEH Digital Start-up program with the information that US organizations working with non-US partners are welcome to apply. Overcoming distance while working closely with your own local community (users, context providers, tool creators) ran through the 90 minutes. My sense is that this is extremely nonlinear work which needs much more attention to new ways to coordinate our efforts.
Outreach, Preservation and Access Initiatives Within and Between Regions
Karan Sheldon, panel chair. Presenters:
Marion Hewitt, Director, North West Film Archive, Manchester, UK. Partnerships with Regional Broadcasters and Cinema Exhibitors How can we balance the pressures of delivering services which increase an archive’s profile with the preservation needs of an ever-growing collection?
Sue Howard, Director, Yorkshire Film Archive, York. The Digital Film Archive of Yorkshire with 50 hours of moving image, catalog and contextualisation notes, and an educational zone. The intention is to build the DFAY as a replicable model; the template for community participation and evaluation will need to be revised according to the audiences and regions targeted.
Megan Peck, Archival Consultant, The Texas Film Round-Up, Austin, Texas. Digitization initiatives across Texas include collaborative projects with varying results and little attention to audiovisual material. The Texas Archive of the Moving Image will launch the Texas Film Round-Up working with communities and small museums, libraries, historical societies toward the creation of a digital moving image collection.
Nicolette Bromberg, Visual Materials Curator, Special Collections, University of Washington Libraries, Seattle, WA. The projects are the Washington Film Preservation Project and a pending IMLS grant for larger three-state project.
The AMIA Regional Audiovisual Archives interest group has a listserv. Join us.
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.