First Steps: Creating a Media Archive
2. However long those think-tank meetings on your preservation plans take, start anywhere. Got a box under your desk that annoys you every time you want to put your feet there? It s as good a place as any to start.
3. Have everybody do a little bit every day. I learned this from my mom - a working mom in the 1950s - who obliged us all to carry upstairs anything parked on the steps. Never go anywhere empty-handed, and teach this to teammates. Start small with baby steps. (Now, forgive me if this is too obvious, but ...)
4. Before you handle tapes or set up computers to catalogue stuff, here are simple things you can do that will immediately add years to the life of the media: Move materials on the windowsill in the sun to the shade. Pile media in cool, dry spots. Put a pallet under stuff on wet floors, and plan to move them to cool-and-dry soon. Move stuff out of basements and attics and foul storerooms, even if it means temporarily taking over the coolest, driest corner of the office. Tell everyone (staff, board members, makers, families, the public) to spread the word: Media materials like people-comfortable space. Let film breathe easy; get it out of coffee cans or Tupperware. Give co-workers the window on the sunny side of the building. Tell jokes while you move stuff.
5. If the technology, material, and terms are not familiar to you, get help now. Help can be as close as us "old, weird film guys" (or our brethren, those "videots" sharing air at this NAMAC salon).
Find a knowledgeable older film or video maker who still has memory (joke). (You do not have to fly me in to train you but I will consider any offer this month from Italy or the Antilles.) Or find a media teacher, local professor, or a retired Kodak, Sony, or Fuji rep with enough years experience to have handled all these various materials. Make a sample pile of strange items, and have her or him show you what each tape, reel, gauge, or format is. Take a picture of each item, and write down where it fits in the history of technology - film, audio, or videotape.
6. Make and post a giant chart in your workspace with the snapshots of items and physical descriptions (pictures of U-matic and other cartridges; pictures of various open reel videos). Teach what you learn so helpers or interns get informed. Repeat lessons often as you learn more.
Try to learn about all the elements, from soup to nuts. You need to know how film, audio, or video production works, and how the artists and labs worked, or order to figure out which materials could exist.
7. Make a second big chart, a flow chart of elements, from camera original through all the production and postproduction steps right to distribution, if any. (I have requested Kodak do a flow chart of elements within film production, historically.)
To make your work even more fun and challenging, be aware that the postproduction paths in film and in video varied by maker, project, decade, budget, and from lab to lab. The paths tend to be highly idiosyncratic and poorly documented by artists and labs.
8. Ask questions. If any of these terms throw you, find out what they are: reversal film, negative, internegative, IP, interpositive, master, original, camera original, dupe, protection master, compression, noise reduction, and on and on. ACVL, the Association of Cinema and Video Laboratories, has a glossary on its website, www.acvl.org.
9. Delay making preservation copies until you know more. I am always aggrieved to hear tales of scarce preservation money used to make a new master off some substandard umpteenth-generation piece of material because someone was in a hurry or not trained or did not know to look for the original or another better source. Remastering off bad elements is a waste and a disservice to the maker, the subject, and future viewers.
10. As you are moving boxes up out of the muck, begin to notice and sort by condition. Film that has white powder or smells strongly of vinegar should be quarantined at least 25 feet from other film, or, even better, put in another room! Check the box of tapes that is sitting in dampness; it might be a priority to rebox if you suspect it contains masters, though would not be urgent if the box clearly contains VHS copies for distribution.
11. Think and talk about what s import to you and your organization s mission. You cannot do it all, so try to do what you can do well and what only you and yours can do at all. This means that you and your team will have decisions to make going in. The clearer you are about what you can do, the better.
12. Promote stuff higher on the to-do list if the media is from a living artist, or if you know there s an artist s close helper alive who is older, fragile or sick. You need to get first-hand help before it is too late.
Do not underestimate the information you can get from friends, family, real fans of a work, researchers, or community members. Ask, show them things, and ask some more.
13. Get out of this work and pass it on if you don t look forward to coming to work each day. Use the best part of your personality, and get a willing helper for the parts you hate. The happy-and-good moving-image preservation people I meet have these skills: librarian, detective, forensic expert, social historian, diplomat, activist, finagler, and psychologist - this last in order to be able to deal with makers, subjects, their families, and the people in power who do not understand the need for or urgency of this work.
14. Be strategic. You will need helpers, high status friends, money, time, and more money. The incredibly rare film or video artwork in dire shape may not be the one to copy first. Often making a short reel of funny, poignant, appalling, or appealing clips will raise support and awareness faster and zoom you along your path.
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TONI TREADWAY is a media preservation activist and founder of IC8. Since 1976, she has been advocating for 8mm film and giving technical assistance to 8mm filmmakers.
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© 2002 National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture. All Rights Reserved.
