1. Besser--Moving Image Longevity 3/16/01 1 Moving Image Longevity Howard Besser UCLA School of Education & Information http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/~howard

2. Besser--Moving Image Longevity 3/16/01 2 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

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

4. Besser--Moving Image Longevity 3/16/01 4 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

5. Besser--Moving Image Longevity 3/16/01 5 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.

6. Besser--Moving Image Longevity 3/16/01 6 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

7. Besser--Moving Image Longevity 3/16/01 7 The Easy Part of the Problem: Physical storage devices & hardware players

8. Besser--Moving Image Longevity 3/16/01 8 Analog - EIAJ 30

9. Besser--Moving Image Longevity 3/16/01 9 Analog - U-Matic

10. Besser--Moving Image Longevity 3/16/01 10 Analog - VHS & Betacam

11. Besser--Moving Image Longevity 3/16/01 11 8mm video

12. Besser--Moving Image Longevity 3/16/01 12 Digital -128M Optical

13. Besser--Moving Image Longevity 3/16/01 13 Digital - Optical R/W

14. Besser--Moving Image Longevity 3/16/01 14 Digital - DAT

15. Besser--Moving Image Longevity 3/16/01 15 Digital - Syquest

16. Besser--Moving Image Longevity 3/16/01 16 Digital - Zip 100

17. Besser--Moving Image Longevity 3/16/01 17 Digital - Writeable CD-ROM (650M)

18. Besser--Moving Image Longevity 3/16/01 18 Edison

19. Besser--Moving Image Longevity 3/16/01 19 Early Wax

20. Besser--Moving Image Longevity 3/16/01 20 The Hard Part of the Problem: File Formats _ even with text like Wordstar & Word

21. Besser--Moving Image Longevity 3/16/01 21 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

22. Besser--Moving Image Longevity 3/16/01 22 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

23. Besser--Moving Image Longevity 3/16/01 23 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)?

24. Besser--Moving Image Longevity 3/16/01 24 Conceptual Approaches to Digital Preservation _ Refreshing always necessary due to volatility of physical strata –Impact on evidential value _ Migration -- advantages & disadvantages _ Emulation -- advantages & disadvantages

25. Besser--Moving Image Longevity 3/16/01 25 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  Internet Archive  Long Now

26. Besser--Moving Image Longevity 3/16/01 26 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

27. Besser--Moving Image Longevity 3/16/01 27 More Technical Issues _ Complexity of formats (storage & compression) _ Synchronicity between media/streams _ Persistent Ids- _ Website mgmt-

28. Besser--Moving Image Longevity 3/16/01 28 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

29. Besser--Moving Image Longevity 3/16/01 29 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”

30. Besser--Moving Image Longevity 3/16/01 30 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

31. Besser--Moving Image Longevity 3/16/01 31 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

32. Besser--Moving Image Longevity 3/16/01 32 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)

33. Besser--Moving Image Longevity 3/16/01 33 Standards for encoding artists 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

34. Besser--Moving Image Longevity 3/16/01 34 Structural Metadata Standards for Encoding Multimedia- _ SMIL _ MPEG 4

35. Besser--Moving Image Longevity 3/16/01 35 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

36. Besser--Moving Image Longevity 3/16/01 36 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

37. Besser--Moving Image Longevity 3/16/01 37 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

38. Besser--Moving Image Longevity 3/16/01 38 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.gseis.ucla.edu/~howard http://www.archive.org/ Moving Image Longevity