Appraisal and Selection in
Moving Image Archives:
Legacy and Transformations
introduction
In July of 2015, the American political news website Politico posted an item about
the Library of Congress' so-called Twitter Research Access project. In it, the author
bemoans the Library's failure to deliver on its promise of making Twitter's entire
tweet archive available to researchers - an objective it first communicated in the
Spring of 2010. The article quotes a spokesperson for the institution, who blames
the delay on the technical complexity of archiving and preserving such an enormous
collection, on the effort that goes into making it searchable, and on the interplay
of both with the financial restrictions a public institution has to work under.1
More than a decade earlier, historian Roy Rosenzweig, aware of the potential
research value of the more ephemeral kinds of digital records, already anticipated
some of the difficulties of preserving, managing, and above all making accessible
large collections of electronic data. While focusing on the threat of data loss, his
article draws attention also to the perils of information overload. Fellow-historians,
he observes, tend to worry primarily about the scarcity of data, but an abundance of
those can prove just as debilitating. For this reason, he urges them to heed archivists'
pleas for record selection - a task which, at the dawn of a "Digital Era" in which
information is ubiquitous, they consider increasingly urgent. In his view, historians
should cease to oppose their efforts and get involved instead.2
For moving image archivists, concerns about technical complexity and cost (as
highlighted by the Library of Congress Twitter example) and the urgency of archival
decisions (as touched upon by Rosenzweig) are hardly new. Film and magnetic tape,
the legacy media of audio-visual archives, not only take up a lot of storage space but
are also very expensive to preserve - that is, duplicate or migrate - due to the
combined cost of the materials involved and the highly specialist, time-consuming
work it requires. In addition to this, such media deteriorate a lot more quickly than
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paper, the staple of text-based archives, and are subject to the unrelenting laws of
obsolescence. Paired with the often very shaky funding status of the institutions
that keep them, and non-governmental ones in particular, these factors have always
forced onto AV archivists a good deal of momentous choices.3
In light of this, it is all the more surprising that historically, the literature on moving
image archiving has barely been concerned with the responsibility of governing what
enters archives and is kept in there. The late Sam Kula, a long-time AV archivist and
one of very few to publish on the topic, has pointed out on several occasions that the
tasks of appraisal and selection of moving images have long been performed without
reference to explicit (i.e. written) agreements on how they should be done. He
attributes this primarily to disagreement among practitioners, on the procedures
followed but also the standards or criteria adhered to.4 Others have drawn attention
to the conflicting interests of those producing (and reusing) records and those
safeguarding them, in broadcast contexts in particular.5 In recent years, however,
selection has forcefully pushed itself to the forefront of the agenda - also in AV
archives.6 Custodians are confronted with an exponential growth in the production
of moving images; in addition, born-digital records exacerbate the problem of
obsolescence, which forecloses any sort of complacency in preservation. While a
film with no signs of decay, kept in proper storage conditions, can easily wait a few
years for a decision on whether or not it should be preserved, digitally produced and
distributed ones tend to require immediate action.
The recent interest in matters of selection is accompanied by a number of shifts in
the practice of moving image archivists. In this article, I want to discuss the relations
between them in an introductory fashion. First, I briefly (and selectively) review the
literature on moving image appraisal and selection, arguing that historically, these
practices have been carried out in rather "covert" ways, unaffected by profound
reflection within the profession at large. Next, I zoom in on the implicit or explicit
criteria that have governed those practices, both historically and more recently. In
the last section of the piece, I then consider how the transition to digital workflows
affects the ways in which appraisal and selection are done today. In particular, I am
interested here in where in the archival process selection decisions are made, who
gets involved (inside and/or outside custodial institutions) and how the concerns
of practitioners are shifting along the way. In light of the article's exploratory intent,
I do not seek to make a significant theoretical contribution here - although efforts
in this direction are certainly overdue.
To compensate for the relative scarcity of sources on the topic, the last section of
the article relies in part on conversations with professionals. Interviews have been
conducted with experts at the Netherlands' two main audiovisual archives: the EYE
Filmmuseum (abbreviated in what follows as EYE) and the Netherlands Institute
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1 N. Scola, 'Library of Congress' Twitter archive is a huge #FAIL', Politico, 11 June 2015,
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/library-of-congress-twitter-archive-119698.html#ixzz45oNqBtQq
(accessed 20 April 2016).
2 R. Rosenzweig, 'Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era', American Historical Review
108:3 (2003) 735-762.
3 In this article, I alternate the term "moving image" with "audiovisual" (or "AV") archive; I do this primarily
for stylistic reasons (i.e. to avoid repetition). Strictly speaking, of course, the two are not synonymous,
since sound recordings also are "audiovisual media". In the literature on moving image archiving and
preservation, however, the two are often used interchangeably.
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4 See for instance S. Kula, 'Archival Appraisal of Moving Images', in: P. Walne (ed.), Selected guidelines for the
management of records and archives: a RAMP reader (Paris 1990), http://www.unesco.org/webworld/ramp/
html/r9006e/r9006e00.htm (accessed 13 May 2016) [see also http://unesdoc.unesco.org/
images/0008/000871/087132eo.pdf (accessed 20 March 2018) - ed.], or S. Kula, Appraising Moving Images:
Assessing the Archival and Monetary Value of Film and Video Records (Lanham-Maryland-Oxford 2003) 3 5-36,
39, 59-61.
5 See for instance T. Connors, 'Appraising Public Television Programs: Toward an Interpretive and Compara
tive Evaluation Model', The American Archivist 63:1 (2000) 164, or M. Ide and L. Weisse, 'Developing
Preservation Appraisal Criteria for a Public Broadcasting Station', The Moving Image 3:1 (2003) 151.
6 Compare T. Wisniewski, 'Framers of the Kept: Against the Grain Appraisal of Ephemeral Moving Images',
The Moving Image 7\2 (2007) 2-3.
