Info-Gathering Session about Setting Up DPAC Archives with Jeannette Kopac

Meeting with Jeannette Kopac, former CBC archivist, current Program Director of the Center for Digital Media, Great Northern Way Campus. Francis and Kedrick in attendance: Francis states that we are looking at what practical steps we might want to be taking in setting up the digital archives that we are acquiring and what to do with it. Under the right condition, (optical) film keeps, but tape doesn’t have any shelf life. You should transfer everything to film if you want to keep it. Film is the only recording media that has any life. The most important thing is you have to have a means of playback. (KJ mentions the betacam footage, other VHS, etc.) The betacam the base can start to deteriorate, VHS is the worst, and so the priority is to try to get it off tape. Jeannette describes her interest in the Association of Moving Image Archivists. They have a forum, with various interest groups, particularly an interest group within the forum about art film. They work at preserving disappearing copies of one-of-a-kind prints. Jeannette suggests that she would choose one of the MPEG formats as the primary storage formats. QuickTime can be used for lower resolution versions. But if you are recovering decaying materials, you first need to do triage on it. The first priority is preservation. You can prioritize based on the format, the most unstable formats first. The CBC has tape-cleaning machines. We can ask for help with this from CBC Vancouver’s Colin Preston. Presently he is doing Jeannette’s old job. He is really helpful with free stuff. He is an unacknowledged, though huge, community resource. So getting the tapes cleaned should happen first. Then you need a standard digital format (although these keep changing). Next, we will also need a set of categories that can used to define what the artifact is.  You need to connect these classifications to the source material you are dealing with, and what that source material is going to be stored on. Computers will allow you to do massive storage, so the primary task is to transfer the data, classify it (could be at the same time) and then just treat it as data once the collection has been organized according to archive. KJ asks about the National Archives in Canada. Jeannette responds that they have the only 2-inch tape machines that are kept in Canada! The National Archives have no money, they have an amazing facility but nobody to run the equipment. Won’t accept any new material unless it is “Canadian” and the BC Provincial archives have no staff to run their equipment, just a storage vault. They don’t accept donations of people’s private records any more. Jeannette repatriated all CBC material from the BC archives because they do not keep their collections in good condition. The Alberta provincial archives are in Edmonton, and they do the opposite. They maintain excellent archives. The woman in charge (I missed her name) is very active and forward thinking. She is an actual, fully-fledged artist and sometimes works with archival material in her shows. One of the points of having an archive, Jeannette emphasizes, is to open access to it. An archive is pointless if it is not being used. For the Edmonton archive they converted an old laundromat into a amazing archive. Francis states that we have a lot of thoughts about how to work with a lot of different sources, different kinds of products, from computer poetries to important event footage. We may want to provide links to various works that are already in digital format as well. Jeannette: That’s a manageable thing to do, become an aggregator of the material, rather than just collecting it, leaving it all in one place like a physical archive. Like Jim’s stuff at vispo.com, which brings together work by different artists as well as his own, and you link to it, (creating a link hub). We need to consider the multiple point of access to the collection. Getting the material digitized is only half of the picture, you also need to get the word out there, market it. However, the physical work of doing it is intense. Once the collecting and digitizing is done, making it public is another part of running a good archive. KJ asks about funding archives… Jeannette suggests AB Preservation trust. They fund archival projects. Heritage Canada has one-time funds. Various different communities, such as ethnic groups also have money for projects if they are related. There is a certain trendy factor to this. Project that have appeal at the time, to specific communities, can be used to generate funds, some private donors will pay to have materials archived.  There are plenty of weird little pots of money in the big scheme of things, if you go looking and working around special interests. Every special interest group has an archival bent (Francis suggests Golfers archives, and so on, sports is a big one). But usually they begin with stuff that has been kept in someone’s basement for a number of years. They just couldn’t part with it or throw it out. But again, the issue in such cases is to work from a priority of triage, rescuing materials. How did the CBC archives get funding when Jeannette was working with them? They started with the marketable stuff to raise money and then used that revenue to achieve some other projects, recovering less marketable materials. One needs a good pilot project, to say “Look at what we just restored, this invaluable cultural legacy that people really want” then market it to funders—base your application on a few high appeal projects. Start small, then use those projects to get more funding. You could create a user-group to help get the word out, link to other organizations with similar interests, and share traffic. The inaccessibility of archives is the big issue. People get excited when they know it’s out there and available. Then you can make a splash and get more interest in your work and organization. Specialists can take over specific parts of the project related to their special interests. For example, there is a guy who markets rare performances. When Jeannette was first setting up the CBC archives, he went through all the archives and looked at what he could profitably license, and they started the recovery projects with that material. They would sell these works (once reformatted) and use the profits to do more. Did it with the Rudolf Nureyev Foundation. Jeannette knew who the specialists were in each genre and this helped leverage funds and interest (CBC archives of course cover a broad variety of genres and topics). Fans are amazing: they will spend money on what they want. So this material can be recovered first. At the CBC they had a doors concert, and the Doors foundation paid for it to be recovered, even though they would not release it because of legal issues around rights and permissions, remaining band members bickering, etc. You could create mini festivals to raise money. The way they raised the most money was (she was doing guerilla-style fundraising) they did a dog and pony show; they brought in material that had already decomposed. The film was malodorous, made your eyes water it was so bad. She presented these travesties, explaining that these were once the David Suzuki show, also used a Front Page Challenge show interviewing Malcolm X and explained all this was being lost. She used this technique of persuasion to generate 55 million dollars in funding to restore and preserve the archives. (Where did the money come from?) They got it from CBC. This is when the CBC had more money. That particular board of directors of the broadcast corporation took it out of the reserve funds. They didn’t want to be responsible for the deterioration of that legacy of Canadian history, the biggest and most diverse records in Canada. Jeannette argued that it was the responsibility of that corporation to give the public access to it. In her opinion, over time, the CBC tried to commercialize it too much, so that it was more about sales than accessibility. So the idea of producing materials in both high resolution for purchase, lower resolution for open access is a good idea. They did this at the CBC, they had some rare jazz performances in the archives, which were gleaned, cleaned, and they packaged it for sale. There was a concert given by Charles Mingus in Vancouver. A rarity; they called the album “The Mind of Mingus”, and jazz aficionados went nuts over it. It’s all about niche markets. People are all willing to get involved if their interest is captured (by a particular project). You need a mechanism for marketing what you put other there. You need to have distribution too. But there are other ways get materials to market. There are local distributors, but you might also want to join a distribution coop. Here are a couple online archival organizations to consider: www.archives.org www.amianet.org Rick Prelinger started up Archives.org. He preserves everyday stuff, ephemera, his main point is that it is the everyday that we are not saving. He is particularly interested in workplace films from the fifties and so on. Most of it was just getting lost, so he set about not only collecting it, but also gave it to the US Federal archives in Washington in case he passed away and it all got lost again. Archives.org is a site that greatly encourages people to download and use the archived materials. He offers an annual prize for the best use of the materials. It might also be a potential home to house the digital archives (on his servers). In keeping with our idea, you have to pay for the high quality versions of his archives, the low resolution versions are free. Join online newsgroups and put a link to the DPAC site to draw people to the archives to boost sales. Francis mentions that North Vancouver archives did the same, producing high resolution photographic records for sale, lower resolution for free. You could have links to sites all over the place and become an aggregator of work being produced by artists working in the digital poetry genre. Francis mentions we are in the process of starting to put grant applications together. Maybe start with Heritage Canada, the Province, etc. Jeannette says start small, then grow, based on proof of what you have already done. It can be hard for people to understand the value of archives, so you need to provide them with a clear sense of why the work is important. You need to track (website) usage. You will still need a fairly large storage space for this, but as it grows you can get people like Colin to help you do various aspects of the work, and he will do so for a copy (of the finished product). You could also work as a service, an organization where people could bring their stuff to be archived, and pay for it as a service. This is what Jeannette and the CBC did for the Toronto film festival—to get charity status they had to have an archive. Jeannette provided space for the archive in the CBC vault.  Now about cleaning the tape. They did a project with Art Spiegelman (on Mauss) and got all his original materials of interviews with his father and so on, and by getting them cleaned they were able to recover them which they would not have been able to do otherwise because they were not kept properly. You could also do workshops where people could learn about preserving their collections. These artifacts and things can get mould. KJ mentions that our goal is not to keep the artifacts, but to digitize them (since the tape is decaying anyway), but for some archives we might want to get the originals into a safe temperature and humidity-controlled place. Jeannette mentions that CBC (Vancouver) just got a new vault. Colin Browne wants to build an archive. His concern is that there are so many independent filmmakers and there is no central home for independent’s work. He’s been trying to get this together for a long time. What’s going to happen to this stuff? He wants to create a non-provincial archive of movement and sound. They tried for years to fund it but couldn’t attract any funders. The project, AVBC, is now a defunct organization that Colins Browne and Preston, and Jeannette, worked on together. But the problem was the time it takes to get together. People don’t have the time. Jeannette relates a story about getting an Alert Bay archive project together. Francis asks if there was resistance to collecting materials? Jeannette responds that the connection was facilitated by a personal contact living in Alert Bay. AMIA, the Association of Moving Image Archivists, is a group we should look into. If you have a kind of collection you are trying to save, then you can list it with them and this is a good way to find people with fringe collections—hobby archivists, so to speak. You want to find out if anybody has stuff you need to know about, to give depth to the archive. Another useful group are retired CBC engineers, and so on; they can build playback machines for obsolete formats, like the Andy Warhol foundation did for their archives. Jeannette prefers the term Digital Asset Management to archives: archive has the connotation of uselessness, the collection of relics. In the Hollywood studios, archives and libraries are discussed as assets. Archives need rationales as to why you are keeping it. Are you keeping everything? If you are being selective are you playing god? Research value, administrative value, all the different ways the collections can be considered as assets and appropriately valued. Perhaps the first thing we need to do is to create an inventory. The inventory is a very important stage in determining what needs to be done, what you have or where the desired materials are currently; then you begin the triage process based on that inventory. So, in summary, we need to find out what is out there, what is most in need of recovering, then selectively start small with specific projects we can use to promote our work, draw people to it, market it and get some funding for larger scale projects. **** Many important ideas arose during this meeting, some of which we have not yet discussed, such as creating an inventory, working on online networking as a mode of collection and marketing, and practical matters, such as using the CBC as a resource for tape cleaning and perhaps as a controlled vault to store physical archives once we are done digitizing them.  Jeannette also mentioned Colin Preston, the CBC archivist who is currently doing her old job. Colin works with Marie-Helene Robitaille, both of whom Francis knows quite well. He has agreed to try and set up a meeting for us to talk with them and explore these ideas and leads further. Many thanks to Jeannette for her great generosity and willingness to share information and insights.