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. 199 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.

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Jaarboeken Stichting Archiefpublicaties | 2018 | | pagina 101