video and film to digital formats. For audio and video this has been for preservation. The old carriers are obsolete, they are deteriorating over a timescale measured in decades, and so most audio and video collections have projects for transferring content onto digital carriers: CD, DVD, digital audio tape (now itself obsolete), digital video tape, datatape and hard drives (e.g. the wax cylinder project of the University of California, Santa Barbara13). Almost as though technology were wilfully intensifying the pressure, the price of hard drives has dropped faster than that of other forms of mass storage. Discrete media such as DVD require robotics to create a mass storage system. Datatape also requires robotics, but can produce relatively larger storage systems because of its greater storage capacity (a modern datatape can hold 300 times as much as a CD14). Hard drives now compete in both capacity and price with datatape, though computing total cost of ownership (TCO) over 20 years is not easy - for any media. The point is not whether disc or tape is cheapest. The point is that disc storage is now (2004) roughly 100 times cheaper that it was in 1997, and so it is possible to put large volumes of storage online at relatively low cost. The benchmark figure is US$1 per gigabyte for purchase (construction) of a petabyte of disc storage with all system components for supporting online access15, though average mass storage systems currently have a TCO of more like US $10 per gigabyte per year.16 EC Projects In addition to the general technology developments just reviewed, there has been a decade of concerted European effort, with considerable EC research support, toward developing the technology needed to preserve audiovisual media and make it available online. The Euromedia project grew out of discussions at the FIAT-IFTA conference in 1994, and received funding from 1996 to 1999. The problem was that broadcast archives are documented at the programme level, and online media really needs to be accessed in smaller units - at the shot level for video. So Euromedia promoted concepts and a workflow now taken for granted: ingest of conventional media to a computer hard drive; automatic shot detection and keyframe extraction; presentation of these results as a story-board for manual documentation; encoding of proxy versions of the video at reduced bitrate; delivery of keyframes (and catalogue text) in response to a search; click on a keyframe to see the video. The follow-on from Euromedia was Amicitia (2000-2002), which has a website17 (Euromedia was too soon!and concentrated on the use of online media in TV production, with a European perspective. It looked at how to use a common catalogue, with multi-lingual searching, by work teams across Europe: UK, Germany, Austria, Netherlands. Projects since then have addressed a constellation of issues: the manual effort needed in indexing, and standards for metadata (Echo18), the general development of European digital libraries (Delos19), image restoration (for video and film; Aurora20, Brava21 and Diamant22), audiovisual preservation (for broadcasting: Presto23; for film: First24; and for all audiovisual collections: PrestoSpace25). Related projects of significance are: Sepia26, which showed that non-specialists could be trained in photographic collections management and preservation; Erpanet27, which is still active and provides information and training in all areas relating to digital preservation (preserving things that are already in a digital form); Birth28, which is the first project to collect TV material from across Europe for a public-access website. It has faced, and solved, many issues seen as preventing public access to broadcast material. Changes in Legislation, Policy and Attitudes Today's small online collections, and projects like Birth, show what can be done. Yet all current online collections, in all media and for all purposes, still show only one particular kind of media: the kind with minimum copyright problems. Real change requires shifting the copyright boundaries, and their interpretation. Significant changes are occurring, in the areas of copyright legislation, Creative Commons and common repositories. In general, the period of copyright has been extended, in the US and in inter national legislation. This has protected certain significant works, specifically the Disney Studio's copyright in Mickey Mouse. It has also greatly increased the number of 'orphan'works: media which has no identifiable copyright holder, so cannot be legally used - or even copied for preservation - but is deteriorating on shelves for lack of investment in preservation. The problem is that interested third parties would make such investment - but would want some form of access in return. Under current law there is no way to provide access to these orphans, and so they wither in obscurity. This issue is taken up in greater detail on various campaigning websites.29 A novel and rapidly growing approach to rights is to create positions between 'all rights' and 'no rights'. This approach encourages rights owners to make material available to the public under specified conditions - to donate their works to the 'creative commons', knowing that they can still have legal control over allowed and disallowed usage. The Creative Commons30 has been the single most productive force for enlarging public access, and has been used by many persons and institutions, including the BBC.31 This paper cannot go into the complexities of digital preservation, which has its TOEGANG 13 http://www.library.ucsb.edu/speccoll/pa/cylinderstech.html 14 0.7 GB for a CD, 200 GB for a high-capacity datatape 15 httpwww. archiveorgwebpetabox.php 16 Dietrich Schueller, Phonogrammarchiv, Austrian Academy of Science, Vienna, personal communication, June 2004 17 For Amicitia see: http://amicitia.v2.nl/amicitia/, http://www.amicitia-project.de/ 18 For Echo see: http://pc-erato2.iei.pi.cnr.it/echo/ 19 For Delos see: http://www.delos.info/ 20 For Aurora see: http://www.ina.fr/recherche/projets/finis/aurora/resume.en.html 21 For Brava see: http://brava.ina.fr/ 146 RICHARD WRIGHT ACCESS TO AUDIOVISUAL ARCHIVES - NEW METHODS 22 For Diamont see: http://diamant.joanneum.ac.at/ 23 For Presto see: http://presto.joanneum.ac.at/index.asp 24 For First see: http://www.film-first.org/first/ 25 For PrestoSpace see: http://www.prestospace.org/ 26 For Sepia see: http://www.knaw.nl/ecpa/sepia/home.html 27 For Erpanet see: http://www.erpanet.org/ 28 For Birth see: http://www.birth-of-tv.org/ 29 http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/about/cases/kahle_v_ashcroft.shtml; http://www.boycott-riaa.com/ http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/6101 30 http://creativecommons.org/ 31 www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2004/0 5_may/26/creative_archive.shtml 147

Periodiekviewer Koninklijke Vereniging van Archivarissen

Jaarboeken Stichting Archiefpublicaties | 2005 | | pagina 75