preservation - cold, dry storage as opposed to copying or migration, the long-term
strategies - ceased to be relevant, as the former was no longer an option.67 On the
other hand, caution was in order, as it was difficult to foresee how technology would
develop. The question arose for instance whether over time, storage space might
cease to be an issue, so that the task of selection could eventually be eliminated.
(These days, this is no longer considered a feasible option, whether practically or
financially. An interviewee at Sound Vision argues that it is not desirable either, as
one of the defining features of a public archive is precisely that it cares for a carefully
composed and proportioned body of work.68) Especially with regard to technical
selection, or the decision as to which components of AV objects to keep and which to
dispose of, the assumption was that delaying it would eventually allow for a practice
informed by a better understanding of its consequences, and perhaps even for
automation of some of the work involved.69
At Sound Vision, the shift to digital ingest of broadcast materials essentially
entailed that selection for those records was no longer performed at the time of
acquisition (as it used to be). Appraisal is still done up front: each item that enters
the archive - whether directly from the broadcasters, or as deposited for long-term
safekeeping - is assigned a category (A, B, C or D) that reflects its "cultural-
historical value".70 For short-term reuse purposes, all materials are preserved at the
highest service level. Further retention and disposal decisions, the assumption is,
will be taken when a first format migration is up (so in other words, technological
developments will determine its timing). How the assigned values will factor into
this is still unclear, as staff are just beginning to develop the policies and procedures
to support the task.71 EYE in turn takes in and preserves everything that arrives as
part of the Film Fund agreement.72 On the title level, this practice is in line with its
policy of inclusiveness for Dutch-produced features and documentaries (a policy
that predates the digital era). In addition, the volumes dealt with are more modest
than those at Sound Vision, which entails that there is less of a sense of urgency
here. Yet even so, staff are aware that current practice delays certain curatorial
decisions - decisions that will need to be confronted in the end (presumably, in
preparation for the 2018 collection policy review).73
In terms of their timing, then, the appraisal and selection of born-digital moving
images differ from those practices as applied to analogue materials. Appraisal is
done early on in the records' life cycle and immediately followed by an active form
198
of preservation - the latter being a novelty, in particular, for film archives.74
Selection, in contrast, is generally delayed. For EYE, which is used to acquiring
materials up to decades after they were made, this is common practice. For Sound
Vision, however, it entails a profound shift, both in terms of how it organises its
activities and in terms of how it views its own collection. Since 2007, the institute
makes a sharper conceptual distinction between its dynamic production archive
(consisting of reusable assets, which it maintains as a service to the public
broadcasters as determined by the relevant Ministry) and its long-term cultural
heritage archive (a service to society at large, in the manner of other national
archives and libraries).75 Items that belong to the former may eventually end up in
the latter, but this is not decided until later (even if, indeed, initial appraisal
decisions are made early on). Employees expect that the time lag the new procedure
entails may actually have its advantages, as it will allow for selection decisions to be
taken with some historical distance (a long-time ideal also for broadcast archivists,
but not always realised in practice).76
Yet many questions still remain as to how the task should be performed. The
assumption is that it will no longer be possible to do it by hand, on a case-by-case
basis. Selection of content, the Images for the Future project has highlighted, is
expensive, primarily because of the man-hours involved.77 Sound Vision,
therefore, is trying to devise procedures to automate the process at least to some
extent. But it stresses that human intervention will always be necessary - if only to
allow the institution to benefit from the hindsight that delayed selection affords
(among others so initial appraisals can be reversed if need be).78 An additional
concern however is that working with digital records inevitably entails that beside
content, other factors need to be considered during selection. One of those is
completeness, which is understood in terms of the presence of key metadata as well
as a record's various components. Items with insufficient information about their
provenance or the technical environment they require to be viewed, or without
elements that can help ascertain their integrity and authenticity over time, are
undesirable, as they are destined to become inaccessible and therefore unusable
(or as a Sound Vision collaborator puts it: they are doomed to become "dark
archive").79 So, while technical aspects have always played some role in the selection
decisions which AV archives make, criteria unrelated to the material's content seem
to be progressively gaining importance.
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nieuwe trends en ontwikkelingen
67 Gant, interview.
68 De Jong, interview. With respect to feasibility, some of the concerns are that records not only need to be
stored, but also managed and made accessible (both of which involve IT and manpower, and the attendant
cost). Even if some of these processes can be automated, humans still need to devise and supervise them.
Moreover, the ever-increasing volumes of data kept will need to be migrated to new technological
environments. See ibidem and A. de Jong, 'Selection Revisited', in: FIAT/IFTA Media Management
Commission (ed.), Selected Papers from the FIAT/IFTA Media Management Seminar 'Changing Sceneries,
Changing Roles IV: Keeping Your Best Content and Metadata', Stockholm 13-14 May 2009 (n.p. 2010) 15-19.
69 Gant, interview.
70 De Jong, interview; Lauwers, interview. The categories were developed by the Ministry of Education, Culture
and Science in the 1990s, as part of its Deltaplan for Cultural Management (see note 46). According to
Sound Vision, they are used throughout the Dutch heritage sector (Lauwers, Collection Policy Sound and
Vision, 25). For an explanation of the categories, see the appendix to this article.
71 De Jong, interview; Lauwers, interview. This contrasts sharply with the institute's pro-activeness in matters
of preservation, which is the focus also of the service agreements that are drawn up when materials are
deposited at the archive.
eef masson appraisal and selection in moving image archives: legacy and transformations
72 Exceptions here are the work templates (programme files) which sometimes reside on the hard disks with
finished films that are submitted for preservation.
73 Gant, interview; Roumen, interview.
74 At EYE, arguably, appraisal is done even before production takes place, as the funding decision made is crucial
here.
75 Lauwers, Collection Policy Sound and Vision, 27-28. Remarkable here is that Harvey, in his instalment for the
DCC Digital Curation Manual, argues that in the context of data curation, "the traditional distinction
between records and archives, in which records become archives only when their active use has ceased and
after their value has been ascertained as significant for the future, can no longer apply" (Harvey, 'Appraisal
and Selection', 13). In the case of Sound Vision, this observation clearly does not hold.
76 De Jong, interview; Lauwers, interview. Compare note 27.
77 See note 63.
78 Lauwers, interview; De Jong, interview.
79 De Jong, interview.