besser--moving image longevity 3/16/01 1 moving image longevity howard besser ucla school of...

Besser--Moving Image Longevity 3/16/01 1

Moving Image Longevity

Howard BesserUCLA School of Education & Information

http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/~howard

Moving Image Longevity_ New Products & New Expectations cause New

Paradigms_ The Problem: Maintaining Accessibility to a Work

over time_ The Easy Part of the Problem: Physical storage

devices & hardware players_ The Hard Part of the Problem:File Formats_ Problems with Many Types of Digital Works Today_ Special Characteristics of Electronic Art_ Some approaches to solutions

New products & Shifts in user expectations

_ VCR led to user expectation of time-shifting, which in turn created market for video-on-demand and cinema multiplexes with staggered times

_ WWW will further increase expectation of immediacy, as well as:– viewing massive amounts of related materials– viewing material in fragmented ways

_ DVDs are even further increasing need for ancillary materials, as well as for interactivity and viewing fragments

Key Paradigm Shifts

_ From archiving completed whole works to asset mgmt of both component parts of works and ancillary materials related to the work

_ From preserving a physical artifact to saving a digital work that has no tangible embodiment

Component Parts & Ancillary Materials

_ Out-takes_ Special effects_ Initial casting calls_ Sketches of sets_ Interviews_ Scripts...

_ If the Archivists don’t act to save these, their role will be marginalized. Need to proactively seek out material that may be routinely tossed out.

Maintaining Accessibility to a Work over time

_ Preservation techniques for Physical Artifacts do NOT address the problem of preserving digital works

_ Need to shift from preserving Physical Artifact to preserving disembodied content

The Easy Part of the Problem: Physical storage devices &

hardware players

Analog - EIAJ 30

Analog - U-Matic

Analog - VHS & Betacam

8mm video

Digital -128M Optical

Digital - Optical R/W

Digital - DAT

Digital - Syquest

Digital - Zip 100

Digital - Writeable CD-ROM (650M)

Edison

Early Wax

The Hard Part of the Problem:File Formats

_ even with text like Wordstar & Word

Problems with Many Types of Digital Works Today-

Disappearing Information The Viewing Problem The Scrambling Problem The Inter-relation Problem The Custodial Problem The Translation Problem

The Viewing Problem

Digital Info requires a whole infrastructure to view it

Each piece of that infrastructure is changing at an incredibly rapid rate

How can we ever hope to deal with all the permutations and combinations

The Inter-relation Problem

-Info is increasingly inter-related to other info

-How do we make our own Info persist when it points to and integrates with Info owned by others?

-What is the boundary of a set of information (or even of a digital object)?

Conceptual Approaches to Digital Preservation

_ Refreshing always necessary due to volatility of physical strata– Impact on evidential value

_ Migration -- advantages & disadvantages_ Emulation -- advantages & disadvantages

Groups Working onthe Big Problem

http://sunsite.Berkeley.EDU/Longevity/

CPA Task Force Getty “Time & Bits” Conference & Follow-ups- Emulation experiments in US and Europe

NEDLIB, CURL, Michigan

Internet Archive Long Now

Special Characteristics of Electronic Art

_ What Really is the Work?_ Enormous number of elements can, at times, be very

important to preserve (pacing, color, format, original artifact, elements used to construct the artifact)

_ Pieces and Boundaries_ Dynamic & Lack of Fixity_ Interactivity_ Historical context_ Recontextualization (Postmodernism)_ Difficulty of authentication over time

More Technical Issues

_ Complexity of formats (storage & compression)_ Synchronicity between media/streams_ Persistent Ids-_ Website mgmt-

Pieces of the General Solution (1/2)

-We need to insist upon clearly readable standardized ways for digital objects to self-identify their formats

-We should discourage scrambling -We need to better understand information

inter-relates to other Info, and what constitutes “boundaries” of Info objects

Pieces of the General Solution (2/2)

-People and organizations wishing to make information persist need guidelines of how to go about doing it

-We need to better understand how translating from one storage or display format to another affects the meaning of a work

-We need to save the “behaviors” of a digital object, not just it’s “contents”

Metadata & Standards can be the first line of defense

Can tell you– where the file is (if you can’t find the file)– where more info about the file is (if you have the

file but most other metadata has become separated)– what the file format is– what the compression scheme is– what application program and version is needed for

the file

From the technological point of view:

Standards offer the best hope of overcoming Impediments

_ Easier to maintain a single set of standards over long periods of time

_ Puts your institution in the same large boat with lots of other institutions who will face obsolescence and migration problems periodically throughout the future

What can we do specific to Electronic Art?

_ Enormous number of elements can, at times, be very important to preserve (pacing, original artifact, elements used to construct the artifact)

_ Too complex to save every one of these aspects for every type of material

_ Importance of saving pieces, representations, and documentation_ Involve the creators to capture their intentions_ Importance of Standards_ Familiarize ourselves with recent conservation developments (Who

Knows?, TechArcheology, Tate, IMAP)

Standards for encodingartists intentions

(group efforts)

_ Artists Interviews Project, Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage 1998-1999, Modern Art: Who Cares (http://www.icn.nl/english/6.4.2.html)

_ TechArcheology: A Symposium on Installation Preservation (SFMOMA)

_ IMAP

Structural Metadata Standards for Encoding Multimedia-

_ SMIL_ MPEG 4

Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL)

_ For repurposing and reuse in different ways_ Use XML to reference various pieces in different

ways_ Supported by Realmedia but not Microsoft or

Macromedia

MPEG 4

_ Object-oriented_ Very low level of granularity (even objects vs

backgrounds)_ Scaleable bandwidth use_ Binary Format for Scenes (BIFS) borrows

concepts from VRML

Concluding Remarks

_ Use Standards wherever possible_ Be aggressive about asset mgmt -- saving

component parts and ancillary materials_ Develop an organizational plan for saving

electronic works– Refreshing and either migration or emulation– Standard encoding schemes– Prioritize what needs to be saved

Howard BesserUCLA School of Education & Information

http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Longevity/ http://www.longnow.com/10klibrary/TimeBitsDisc/ http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/~howard/Metadata/UC-May00/ http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Imaging/Databases/ http://is.gseis.ucla.edu/impact/s99/ http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/~howard http://www.archive.org/

Moving Image Longevity

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