Essay: Digital Preservation by Guha Shankar

This post is being released as a companion piece to the 2010 Folklorists in the South & Mid Atlantic Retreat, held June 19-21 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  The meeting theme, “Folk Vérité:  Folklife in Film & Video” explores the use of film and video as documentation and storytelling.  Guha Shankar is one of the Retreat’s guest speakers, and he writes this month’s essay as a companion piece to his professional development session on digital preservation techniques and best practices.

DIGITAL PRESERVATION

It is probably safe to say that where once there were producers of “media products” and audiences/consumers for those products, the distinctions have blurred such that the differences grow ever more indistinct.  From DIY websites to laptop recording studios to desktop publishing to recording devices that fit in the palm of your hand, digital technologies have exploded the range of ways in which individuals and communities document and represent themselves reflexively and to the wider world. Arts and educational institutions and practitioners whose mission it is to document the daily stuff of expressive traditional culture, not to mention community members, have also benefited by the leaps in technology.

But in the specific world of cultural institutions that are charged with caring for the raw and the cooked materials generated through such documentary efforts, the view on the digital revolution is much more muted (or ought to be) in contrast to the euphoria which accompanies the release of the nth iteration of the next killer app or the terrabyte capacity flash drive or the gazillion pixel resolution camera that’s as thin as a wafer. In the rest of this text, and given the space considerations, not to mention the sometimes overwhelming complexity of the topic of “digital” itself, I will confine myself to a prolegomena, offering pointers and links to sites produced by like-minded colleagues for further clarification and for inciting discussions.

Gone, gone, gone…and it ain’t never coming back

On a bright sunny day in early 1985 I walked into the offices of the then- Office of Folklife Programs at the Smithsonian Institution to start work as senior ethnomusicologist Tom Vennum’s Assistant Film Editor. Memory fades, but I remember that the welcoming handshake was immediately followed by the hand-over of 40 rolls of raw 16 mm film footage and synch sound on Rajasthani puppets, accompanied by orders  to start cutting a film on the topic for the Smithsonian Folklife Studies film-monograph series. During my subsequent tenure at the Smithsonian, I edited film and coordinated shoots, worked on Festival sound crews and stages and also got a hands-on course in film preservation methodologies.  To reduce a complex process to its essence, this consisted of making a duplicate negative of the raw film footage and putting it away in cold storage, while using the original negative for cutting the finished film.

It’s difficult to say, twenty-odd years after the fact, that the preservation methods that we aspired to at Folklife was standard practice for small or even larger production outfits. It seemed to me from talking to filmmaker colleagues that they admired the concept of making preservation copies, but in practice, especially given the home-made nature of much of the enterprise, and the tight budgets for cultural documentary film-making, that enthusiasm faded or wasn’t really entertained as a viable strategy. In the end, what was usually preserved was the edited final product, which was a very small percentage of the total footage that was originally captured. The rest of the footage, the outtakes, may have been vaulted, but often was not, and it is generally the case that what survives of cultural film documentaries are the positive workprints, the copies which were used in reviewing and editing the rough cut edits of the final show. Whither the negatives – the originals?

But even as we did our due diligence with the materials we generated, the mediascape was dramatically and fundamentally changing and with it the practices and protocols for capturing, preserving and disseminating the images and sounds of cultural life.  From the late 1980’s on, digital technologies and process became established in the recording and preservation realms, vaulting over magnetic tape formats in a way that’s hard to comprehend for someone such as myself who can still remember the miles of videotape that was used for documentation and the confident “save it to tape” exhortations of preservation practitioners.

Enter the new

This is the point at which I would like to step back and make a few observations about the “digital domain.”  One of the first of these is that “digital” aspires to reach the condition of “naturalization,” to borrow a term from Pierre Bourdieu, and has already achieved that status in the world at large.  Digital is the thing that goes without saying because it comes without saying, so ubiquitous and prevalent in its usage that its wider meaning is understood immediately, or thought to be understood and employed in daily discourse while remaining largely unexamined, like “electricity.” Practice follows discourse, so that all sorts of activities are subsequently labeled digital. Some of these are perfectly benign and mundane, like picking up a phone to sticking a thermometer in the Sunday roast to reading the temperature gauge.

When digital practices are going to be deployed in the cultural production and preservation field, however, mundane is neither the condition nor the practice to which we, as cultural workers, caretakers and custodians, should subscribe. It is an unalterable fact of life in the cultural promotion and presentation field that anyone or any entity engaged in the business of caring for other people’s cultural property has to be cognizant of the basic, critical issues in data capture, management and security (or at least how to defrag your hard drive!). For instance, why using  the term ”archival” in conjunction with “CD” or “DVD” is not just a contradiction in terms, but a virtual guarantee of a problem in the near distant future for your data. Or what the issues are with lousy compression of images or audio. Or why metadata is essential for the long and short term life of your files. This is a far cry from the days when all you had to know about archival storage was whether the shoeboxes you had would hold all your cassette tapes.

Everything Old is New Again

Like the pharmaceutical industry, the digital world that presses upon us workers in the arts, educational and cultural fields must be examined closely for both the promises that are made and the caveats that come attached to the products and processes. The cautions and caveats are sometimes easy to miss in the hyperbolic promotion of some devotees and manufacturers. In the world of pharmaceuticals, it is hard to avoid the TV and internet ads that feature happy, shiny people twirling around the living room in slo-mo, kissing puppies or partners, while the soothing voice of Big-Pharma promises the drug fix for whatever problem ails you. The part that gets muted in the visuals and the promises is the possibility that the solution might have some unwanted consequences.  The “digital domain” is also to be entered into with the same caution.

Guha Shankar

June 2010

I suggest the following sites for reading up on “best practices” (for now) in the realm of digital technology, documentation and digital preservation:

Digital Documentation:

Oral History Association The website provides a range of information from an introduction to digital audio recording technology to a comparison of the technical specifications of several commonly used portable digital recorders, with informative insights by our friend and colleague, Doug Boyd.

Transom.org –  Guide to Field Recording Tools A bit idiosyncratic and too wide-ranging at times; for instance, they consider the iPhone seriously as a recording device. However they conduct extensive tests and provide detailed specs on a range of gear.  The site is probably best read against the grain of the solid advice of other organizations such as the Vermont Folklife Center, where Andy Kolovos dispenses thoughtful advice with the insights of the consummate archivist and bit preservationist: Vermont Folklife Center Audio Equipment Guide.

http://www.digicamhelp.com/ A serviceable site that provides usually helpful advice on makes and models of digital still cameras.

Kodak, Inc. As much about methods and techniques for still photography from one of the industry leaders in the field.

Tools for the Archival Preservation of Digital Objects:

Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative This site is a collaborative effort by federal agencies formed as a group in 2007 to define common guidelines, methods, and practices to digitize historical content in a sustainable manner.

Sound Directions – a joint project of Indiana University and Harvard University One major goal of the project was to test emerging standards and develop best practices for audio preservation. The project created a number of software tools that may be placed into service including the Harvard Sound Directions Toolkit – a suite of forty open-source, scriptable, command line interface tools that streamline workflow, reduce labor costs, and reduce the potential for human error in the creation of preservation metadata and in the encompassing preservation package.

EVIA (Educational Video for Instruction and Analysis) Digital Archive, Indiana University.  The Ethnographic Video for Instruction and Analysis Digital Archive Project was begun by scholars at Indiana University and the University of Michigan in an effort to establish a preservation and access system for ethnographic field video annotated by scholars and made available to educators and researchers online.

Describing, Managing and Providing Access to Archival Collections:

Library of Congress Authorities & Vocabularies. Using Library of Congress Authorities, you can browse and view authority headings for Subject, Name, Title and Name/Title combinations; and download authority records in MARC format for use in a local library system. This service is offered free of charge.

Library of Congress Metadata Encoding and Transmissions Standards The METS schema is a standard for encoding descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata regarding objects within a digital library, expressed using the XML schema language of the World Wide Web Consortium. The standard is maintained in the Network Development and MARC Standards Office of the Library of Congress, and is being developed as an initiative of the Digital Library Federation.

Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS) (Society of American Archivists, 2007) is an output-neutral set of rules for describing archives, personal papers, and manuscript collections, and can be applied to all material types. It is the U.S. implementation of international standards (i.e., ISAD(G) and ISAAR(CPF)) for the description of archival materials and their creators.

Technical Documents on Archiving and Preserving Digital Recordings:

Bradley, Kevin. Risks Associated with the Use of Recordable CDs and DVDs as Reliable Storage Media in Archival Collections – Strategies and Alternatives (UNESCO, 2006)

International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives, 2009.
Guidelines on the Production and Preservation of Digital Audio Objects (TC04 Second Edition).

The following ten point list (not quite commandments) is adopted from my colleague Marcia Segal’s presentations on digitization or transforming cultural legacy materials to present-day formats.

Marcia Segal’s Digitization Tips, Hints, and Clues

1) Before you embark on a digitization project, conduct research on related projects successfully completed at other institutions.

2) Bigger institutions than yours can literally afford to make mistakes.

3) Talk to people who have been involved in digitization work at different institutions, with a variety of concerns, audiences, and budgets.

4) Your goals will define everything you do.

5) Treat a digitization project as your only chance to get the work done.

6) Digitize with both preservation and access in mind.

7) Metadata provides context for digital files.

8)  It takes a year to make a click possible. [online content doesn’t appear automatically: it takes a good deal of planning and preparation to make it possible to click a link and retrieve content]

9) Digital files are fragile.

10) Once you’ve finished a project, don’t retrofit it when new and better digitization methods become available.

11) Items 1 through 10 are subject to change

Guha Shankar is the Folklife Specialist in the American Folklife Center (AFC) at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. He has experience and training in media production, digital assets management, intellectual property and cultural heritage management for traditional communities, public programs and educational outreach (festivals, concerts, symposia and seminars), and teaching documentary field methods for community cultural heritage initiatives. At the AFC he works with a number of archival media collections in the area of digital preservation and production. His research interests include diasporic community formations in the Caribbean, ethnographic media, visual representation, and performance studies. Shankar received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas, Austin in 2003, from the Department of Anthropology, with a concentration in Folklore and Public Culture. He received his M.A., from the University of Texas, Austin in 1996, in Folklore and Public Culture, in the Department of Anthropology. He obtained his B.A. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 1982, with concentrations in Radio Television and Motion Pictures and Political Science.