Preserving New Media:
Issues in Saving the
Orphan/Ephemeral/Experimental Films of the
Future
Howard Besser
UCLA School of Education & Information
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/~howard
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 1
Preserving New Media:
Issues in Saving the
Orphan/Ephemeral/Experimental Films of the Future-
_ Highlights from my background
_ The MIAP program
– General comments
– Specific area for research/teaching: Issues in
Saving the Orphan/Ephemeral/Experimental
Films of the Future
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 2
Highlights from my
background
_ Avant-garde
_ Film Study--Berkeley & Paris
_ „Pataphysics & thesis
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 3
LIS Graduate School
_ Certificate Specializing in “Non-Print
Media”
_ Film Resources Information Group-
_ Funding & managing projects-
_ Authority on automation of film info-
_ Panel that led to NCFVP-
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 4
Published books & Booklets
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 5
LIS Graduate School
_ Certificate Specializing in “Non-Print
Media”
_ Film Resources Information Group
_ Funding & managing projects
_ Authority on automation of film info
_ Panel that led to NCFVP
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 6
Conceiving, Spearheading, and
Funding Big Groundbreaking
Projects
_ Berkeley Image DB (1985) [art images
instead of film]
_ Museum Educational Site Licensing
Project--MESL (1994-98)-
_ Mellon-funded MESL evaluation (1996-99),
$250K-
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 7
MESL Participants
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 8
MESL checkboxes
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 9
MESL browse1
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 10
MESL browse2
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 11
MESL tombstone
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 12
MESL/Mellon-Visual
Resources
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 13
Other Art/Film Preservation
Projects-
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 14
Getty’s Time & Bits (1998)
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 15
Studio Archivists (2000, 2001)
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 16
AMIA article (1992)
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 17
Other large funded projects
_ NEH/DLF Making of America II (1998-99)
$270K
_ Web-based Instructional Support (1997-99)
$270K
_ UCLA/Pacific Bell Initiative for 21st
Century Literacies (2000-2002) $1M
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 18
My Strengths & Biases
_ Conceiving and getting off the ground
large-scale, collaborative, ground-breaking
projects
_ Focus on technological approaches to visual
material
_ Work on making archival material
accessible through technology,
interoperability, standards
_ Bias towards non-bestseller content
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 19
My Impressions of MIAP
Program-
_ Caveats
_ Strengths
_ Cautions
_ Ideas
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 20
Critical Pieces currently in
MIAP program
_ History/Contextualization
_ Important underlying concepts (Collecting)
_ GEH
_ Working professionals teaching at GEH
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 21
Cautions-
_ High Level Concerns-
_ Small program size-
_ Guard against the students identifying too
closely with the GEH approach-
_ Extend principles beyond film-
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 22
Cautions:
High-level Concerns
_ Treading the line btwn Academic &
Professional
_ Need to be inclusive & collaborative to pull
this off well
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 23
Cautions:
Small Program Size
_ Necessary for apprenticeship, but problems
with:
– economic sustainability
– maintaining diversity of students
_ Possible answers
– grow out courses around it, particularly in new
media
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 24
Cautions:
Guard against the students
identifying too closely with the GEH
approach
_ Make sure that graduates will feel
comfortable going into collections that take
different approaches because they‟re:
– Smaller
– Poorer
– Have different collection scopes
– Less film-centric
– Not within museums
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 25
Cautions:
Extend principles beyond film
_ Core principles are similar for handling
video, digital “stocks”, but students need to
be able to distinguish where the principles
differ and where they remain the same
_ From an economic standpt, in future years,
there will be more jobs handling non-film
materials than materials on film stock
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 26
My suggestions
_ Expand high-level concepts (what is work?)
_ Strengthen understanding of underlying economics to
filmmaking and distribution (as well as that of video and
digital if you enter that arena)
_ Enlarge the scope to include video, digital works, new
media
_ Leverage other GEH depts (Education, Collctn Mgmt)
_ Increase the focus on info about the work-
_ Play to your strengths-
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 27
Increase the focus on info
about the work
_ Collectn Mgmt info, preservation record-keeping, etc.
_ Info that‟s far less format-dependent, so skills in this area
withstand the test of time
_ An important growth area in an age where people demand
higher levels of granularity in info about objects
_ Also, research potential w/I this area where NYU can
become int‟l leader (library extending METS, repositories
for shot-by-shot analysis, using semiology to develop
preservation encoding schemes, …)
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 28
Play to your strengths
_ Other repositories in NYC (Anthology, MOMA, Lincoln Cntr,
Kitchen, ...) & important vendors (VidPix)
_ Departmental strengths in independent and avant-garde works (and
NYC as vibrant cntr for these)
_ Academic rigor for examining and deconstructing underlying concepts
(why collect? what is a work? )
_ NYU Library strength in Preservation & in digital metadata
_ Incorporate dept strengths to bring new research to aid in in
preservation (ie. Semiological analysis to construct encoding standards
that will persist over time)
_ Collaborate w/NYC groups working on similar issues (from IMAP to
Guggenheim to Mellon)
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 29
Why focus on the
Orphan/Ephemeral/Experimental
Films?
_ These types of films are both more
interesting and more in peril
_ Best-sellers will be taken care of (for better
or worse) because of market potential
_ These pose more interesting research
questions
_ You‟re not USC
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 30
Future
Orphan/Ephemeral/Experimental
Films will not be on film stock
_ Economics is making film stock and editing
increasingly out of reach for independent
filmmakers
_ Focus is on newer creation formats (video,
digital, multimedia)
_ And digital distribution channels appear to
make it easier to get to audiences
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 31
In the future, most interesting works
will involve digital technology
_ “Once computers become married with
film, the form becomes promiscuous, and
that can bring about new ways of making
movies that the studios can‟t control.”
-Francis Coppola
LA Times, April 7, 2002
Press Play to Access the Future
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 32
Now is excellent time to get
involved in Digital
Preservation. In past year:
_ NSF retreat on digital preservation research
agenda
_ CLIR international meeting
_ CDL Preservation Repository
_ OCLC/RLG Working Group on
Preservation Metadata
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 33
Other Digital Preservation Activities-
LC Natl Dig Info Infrastructure & Preservation
InterPARES
Emulation Projects
E-Journal Archiving
ERPANET
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 34
LC’s National Digital
Information Infrastructure and
Preservation Program
_ Authorized Dec 2000
_ LC, Dept of Commerce, NARA, White House
Office of Sci & Tech Policy
_ with help from CLIR, NLM, NAL, OCLC, RLG
_ Ongoing collab process
_ Commissioned papers on preserving: the Web,
periodicals, digital sound, E-Books, Digital TV,
Digital Video
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 35
InterPARES
International Research on Permanent Authentication
Records in Electronic Systems
_ Ongoing international archival world project
examining how to make electronically-generated
records last over time
_ Developing the theoretical and methodological
knowledge needed, then will formulate model
policies, strategies, and standards
_ Next year will be extended to include images and
rich media
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 36
Emulation Projects
_ CAMiLEON (Michigan/Leeds)
_ NEDLIB
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 37
E-Journal Archiving
_ Issues
– License, don‟t own; may not be even able to obtain right to make archival
copy
– Increasingly no paper back-up at all
– Usually we don‟t have the important redundancy factor
_ Mellon funded projects (2001)
– Yale, Harvard, Penn working w/individual publishers
– Cornell, NYPL--specific disciplines
– MIT exploring characteristics that change (dynamic)\
– Stanford--archiving software tools
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 38
Electronic Resource Preservation
and Access NETwork (ERPANET)
_ Best practices and skills development for
digital preservation of cultural heritage and
scientific objects
_ 3 year project launched Nov 2001; 1.2
million Euros
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 39
NEA 2001 grant to BAVC
for $150,000
_ “To support development and dissemination
of a DVD that contains a curriculum for the
preservation of electronic art. The DVD will
feature a preservation overview; discussions
with conservators, artists, curators and
technicians; a curriculum to train
professionals in the field and project case
studies to conserve electronic art.”
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 40
Digital Preservation now has
high profile
_ Lots of money available
_ Interesting research questions
_ Communities begin to work together
_ Very little yet done with challenging
material like moving images and electronic
art
_ NYU could become leader in this arena
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 41
My research into Digital
Preservation
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 42
Preserving New Media:
What‟s the problem & What can we do
about it?
_ The Problem: Maintaining Accessibility to a Work over time
_ New Products and New Expectations necessitate New Paradigms
_ 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 Works
_ What is the Work?
_ Some approaches to solutions
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 43
The Problem:
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
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 44
Digital Cinema is not like canvas
paintings
_ In the future these may include
– Moving image materials
– Multimedia
– Interactive programs
– Computer generated art
_ These works share some common characteristics
with other “strange” works like
– Performance Art
– Conceptual Art
– Site-specific installations
– Experiential Art
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 45
Thinking of the Future (1/2)
_ Screens will be different resolutions and
different aspect ratios
_ CRTs won‟t exist
_ A decade or 2 from now, today‟s user
interfaces will look like arrow-key
navigation looks like today
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 46
Thinking of the Future (2/2)
_ Today‟s streaming media are small
windows, slow speeds
_ As bandwidth increases, viewers will expect
higher quality streams
_ Artists may need to consider how they‟ll be
able to deliver higher-bandwidth streams
– Delivery Derivatives vs. Masters encoded w/standards
– May also want to re-edit the piece to take advantage of
changes in technology, viewer expectations, society-
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 47
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
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 48
Key Paradigm Shifts for
Museums/Archives
(also implications for artists)
_ 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
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 49
Component Parts & Ancillary
Materials
_ Edit decision list
_ 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 poractively seek out material that may be routinely tossed out.
_ These materials may become important for either re-issuing the piece in a later
version, or for future curators trying to understand the artist‟s intention enough
to re-display the piece when all the software used is no longer available.
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 50
The Easy Part of the Problem:
Physical storage devices &
hardware players
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 51
Analog - EIAJ 30
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 52
Analog - U-Matic
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 53
Analog - VHS & Betacam
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 54
8mm video
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 55
Digital -128M Optical
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 56
Digital - Optical R/W
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 57
Digital - DAT
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 58
Digital - Syquest
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 59
Digital - Zip 100
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 60
Digital - Writeable CD-ROM
(650M)
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 61
Edison
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 62
Early Wax
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 63
The Hard Part of the Problem:
File Formats
_ even with text like Wordstar & Word
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 64
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
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 65
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
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 66
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)?
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 67
The Translation Problem
Content translated into new delivery devices
changes meaning
– -A photo vs. a painting
– -If Info is produced originally in digital form in
one encoded format, will it be the same when
translated into another format?
– Behaviors
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 68
Conceptual Approaches to
Digital Preservation
_ Refreshing always necessary due to
volatility of physical strata
– Impact on evidential value
_ Migration -- advantages & disadvantages
_ Emulation -- advantages & disadvantages
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 69
Groups Working on
the 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
Archive
Internet
Long Now
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 70
Special Characteristics of
Electronic Works
_ What Really is the Work?-
_ Disappearing software
_ Enormous number of elements can, at times, be very important to
preserve (randomness, interactivity, pacing, color, format, original
artifact, elements used to construct the artifact)
_ Pieces and Boundaries
_ Recontextualization (Postmodernism)--which rendition to save?
_ Dynamic & Lack of Fixity (evolving works)
_ Historical context
_ Difficulty of authentication over time
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 71
What Really is the Work?-
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 72
LeWitt: Wall Drawing 340
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 73
Installing LeWitt
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 74
LeWitt Install Directions
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 75
ECI - Imagespace (early 80s)
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 76
ECI - Hole in Space (both)
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 77
ECI - 84-locations
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 78
ECI - 84-Community Memory
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 79
ECI - 84-kids
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 80
ECI - 84-MOCA
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 81
ECI - 84-Annotating Video
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 82
ECI - Avatars & Humans
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 83
ECI - Avatar Stage
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 84
Video Technology to Make the
Head Spin (NYT 3/2/00)
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 85
Special Characteristics of
Electronic Works (again)
_ What Really is the Work?-
_ Disappearing software
_ Enormous number of elements can, at times, be very important to
preserve (randomness, interactivity, pacing, color, format, original
artifact, elements used to construct the artifact)
_ Pieces and Boundaries
_ Recontextualization (Postmodernism)--which rendition to save?
_ Dynamic & Lack of Fixity (evolving works)
_ Historical context
_ Difficulty of authentication over time
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 86
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
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 87
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”
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 88
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
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 89
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
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 90
What can we do specific to
New Media?
_ Works themselves may no longer even exist; in many cases, what we
can save amounts to forensic evidence
_ 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 artists to capture their intentions
_ Importance of Standards
_ Familiarize ourselves with recent conservation developments
(Guggenheim‟s Variable Media, Who Knows?, TechArcheology, Tate,
IMAP)-
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 91
Standards for encoding
artists intentions
(group efforts)
_ Guggenheim‟s Variable Media project
_ 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
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 92
Authors Intentions: Kendall Example
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 93
Standards for encoding
artists intentions
(possible ways to proceed)
_ initially probably a few fixed fields and a lengthy
open field (similar to Technical Imaging Standards
for “reformatting intention”
_ should identify certain types of info that should be
only for museum personnel, some for general
public viewing, and others unknown
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 94
Things that can be done
_ Save documentation about the work and its
context
_ Save interviews with readers/viewers about the
experience
_ Construct repositories that save software, works,
hardware, and engage in ongoing emulation
_ Encode authors intentions-
_ Adhere to non-proprietary software/standards as
much as possible-
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 95
Tensions around Standards
Follow Standards (No Owl, Hypercard, DHTML, Flash, …)
_ innovative, new functions
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 96
Structural Metadata Standards
for Encoding Multimedia-
_ SMIL
_ MPEG 4
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 97
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
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 98
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
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 99
Saving Ancillary Materials
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 100
Concluding Remarks
_ Use Standards wherever possible
_ Be aggressive about asset mgmt -- saving
component parts and ancillary materials
_ Both Artist and Museum should develop an
institution-wide plan for saving electronic works
– Refreshing and either migration or emulation
– Standard encoding schemes
– What is the work? And prioritize what needs to be
saved
– Save ancillary materials and records
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 101
Preserving New Media:
Issues in Saving the Orphan/Ephemeral/Experimental
Films of the Future
Howard Besser
UCLA 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.ecafe.com/
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/~howard
http://www.archive.org/
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 102
Augst/Luddy
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 103
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 104
Not just saving the Work,
but also saving Conservation
info about the Work
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 105
Condition Report
UK National Trust
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 106
Annotated Image
Mississippi State, Heather Gray
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 107
Polarizws Image
Mississippi State, Heather Gray
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 108
X-Ray
Investigating the Renaissance--Portrait of a Man, Fogg Museum
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 109
Underdrawing
Investigating the Renaissance--Last Judgment, Fogg Museum
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 110
Cross-section
Investigating the Renaissance--Last Judgment, Fogg Museum
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 111
Recent Digital Preservation
Activities
Howard Besser
UCLA School of Education & Information
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/~howard
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 112
Preservation Repositories:
Open Archival Info System Model
High-level reference model describing submission,
organization and management, and continuing access
Conceptual framework for different organizations to share
discussions with a common language
Producers, consumers, management, actual repository
SIP, DIP, AIP
AIP consists of data objects plus representation info
(Content, Preservation Description, Packaging,
Descriptive)
Originally developed for Space Science community
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 113
Preservation Repositories:
Projects based on OAIS Model
CEDARS
NEDLIB
Pandora
CDL
OCLC/RLG Working Group on
Preservation Metadata, Attributes of a
Trusted Digital Repository, August 2001-
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 114
OCLC/RLG
Digital Repository Attributes
_ Administrative responsibility
_ Organizational viability
_ Financial sustainability
_ Technological suitability
_ System security
_ Procedural accountability
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 115
OCLC/RLG
Selected Recommendations
_ Policies, Certification processes, Risk management,
Persistent ID, Migration/Emulation experiments
_ Stakeholders meet to decide how to describe what is in a
dig repository
_ Examine special properties of particular classes of digital
objects
_ Technical standards for exchange and interoperability btwn
repositories
_ Develop projects and case studies
_ Copyright issues
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 116
Preservation Metadata
OCLC/RLG Working Group on
Preservation Metadata, Preservation
Metadata for Digital Objects: A Review of
the State of the Art, January 31 2001
OCLC/RLG Working Group on
Preservation Metadata, A Recommendation
for Content Information, October 2001
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 117
Persistent Naming
URNs
Handles
PURLs
Re-directs
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 118
More Technical Issues
_ Complexity of formats (storage & compression)
_ Synchronicity between media/streams
_ Persistent Ids-
_ Website mgmt-
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 119
Persistent IDs--the Problem
_ Need to separate work ID from work
location
_ URNs probably won‟t be ready until 2003
_ Becomes a business process issue when one
organization maintains the resource and
another organization references it (ie.
licensed from vendors or managed by
separate administrative structures)
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 120
More Persistent IDs
--the Approach for today
_ PURLs
_ Handles
_ HTTP redirects
_ And worry about costs now and conversion
costs when URNs become feasible
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 121
Website Management
More issues with referencing IDs
_ References for mirror sites
_ References for back-up sites when main site
is down or bottle-necked
_ References for off-site copies and archival
copies
Besser--NYU 4/11/02 122