Specialists in preserving sound and moving-image media know when things are about to get ugly.
They smell it.
“When we walk into a room, if it smells of vinegar, we know there’ll be degrading film in there,” says Joshua S. Harris, media-preservation coordinator at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s library. Mr. Harris is recounting his recent census of audiovisual collections on the campus. For months he and a colleague sought out audiovisual recordings and the machinery that could play them.
“Some of the stuff was so bad we just took it away immediately and reported it to facilities,” he says. “If reel-to-reel audio tapes are infested with mold,” or insects, as some were, “that’s not something to take lightly.”
Sometimes they had to laugh, like the day they climbed metal ladders higher and higher in the performing-arts center, squeezed past ducts that obstructed narrow catwalks, and from that perch discovered a sound booth, 20 years abandoned. “Inside were at least a thousand audio recordings of performances, all over the floor,” says Mr. Harris. “Some films, too. It was obvious that people had just stood back and thrown stuff in.”
At research universities across the country, archivists are painfully aware that large portions of their institutions’ audiovisual legacies are in decay. Old formats must be digitized if they are to be used, but first they must be identified and salvaged.
The archivists say a 2010 report by the Library of Congress, “The State of Recorded Sound Preservation in the United States,” which declared “a national legacy at risk,” rings especially true in terms of the many campus holdings that are not even cataloged. Worse, they say, is that administrators either aren’t heeding the warnings or can’t find the funds to salvage the material.
“It seems to me immediately obvious that this is something we should be doing. But it’s so terribly expensive,” says Karen Hanson, who was provost at Indiana University at Bloomington when it undertook a similar census a few years ago and now is provost at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.
Archivists say failing to spend money now comes at a high price: the loss to history of vast troves of material.
The census at Illinois turned up 408,000 items in 101 locations on the campus. “The diversity of what we found was incredible,” says Mr. Harris. Rare 1920s films. Caches of ethnomusicology field recordings. Videotaped supercomputer animations. Audiotapes for speech-recognition research. Film documenting the Nobel laureate Paul Lauterbur’s work on magnetic resonance imaging. The sociologist Clark McPhail’s painstakingly indexed film collections of 1960s protests.
‘Curling and Shedding’
Such a complete census of college audiovisual holdings is rare. The Illinois effort took its lead from the one at Indiana University, in 2008-9, called the Media Preservation Initiative. Indiana’s director of media-preservation services, Mike Casey, told Mr. Harris of finding audiovisual items in abandoned buildings, in un-air-conditioned closets, and beneath hot-water pipes next to bottles of chemicals.
In 80 places on the Bloomington campus, Mr. Casey and his colleagues turned up 600,000 audio, video, and film items, in 50 formats, either analog or stored as “physical digital” on disks or drives.
At campus gatherings and archivists’ conferences, he describes the different rates at which various media deteriorate, as surfaces delaminate and magnetic impressions weaken. He spirits from his archivist’s hat terms like “sticky shed syndrome,” “cylinder efflorescence,” “curling and shedding,” and “binder breakdown.” He may recite a litany of playback machinery and parts “unavailable at any price,” “down to their last factory run,” or unrepairable for “lack of bench expertise.”
“Whenever I give that presentation, there are audible groans,” says Mr. Casey.
He takes it as a good sign that Indiana last year committed $15-million over five years to the preservation-and-digitization effort. But as it proceeds, the initiative is heading into uncertain financial waters.
While grant makers, such as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Division of Preservation and Access, are trying to help, he says, “none of the granting agencies have close to enough money to make significant progress on this crisis.” Possible solutions rest with universities’ agreeing “to put resources into this area.”
But Ms. Hanson, the Minnesota provost, notes that even an outlay of $15-million can do little more than serve only as an institution’s “show of good faith” as it seeks from foundations and donors the far greater amount it needs.
Mr. Casey remains hopeful. Know-how for large-scale storage is “well advanced,” he says, and storage costs for digitized audio, and to a lesser extent video, are dropping. As a result, the collections of universities that dawdled a decade ago may end up better off than those at institutions that attempted piecemeal efforts, he says. “We have hit our IT folks here with our numbers, like 8.4 PB over the next few years"—PB, for petabytes: a whole lot of data—"and they see it as very doable. Expensive, but 10 years ago it was not possible.”
Copyright Troubles
Money and know-how are not the only challenges. Copyright troubles, too, hobble archivists’ efforts. “The laws are so confusing,” particularly for recordings made before 1972, when federal copyright protection was first applied to them, says Eugene DeAnna, head of the Library of Congress’s Recorded Sound Section.
Academic archivists say rights problems sometimes seem to prevent even restoring recordings, let alone providing access to them.
Early last year, the Library of Congress followed up its 2010 report with a call to remove copyright barriers to Internet dissemination of audiovisual materials. The U.S. Copyright Office (part of the Library of Congress) and the House of Representatives’ Judiciary Committee have held contentious but inconclusive hearings on the issue.
The report also recommended the creation of a national directory of recorded sound, and the establishment of degree programs in audio archiving and preservation. Only three such programs exist in the United States: at the University of California at Los Angeles, New York University, and the University of Rochester. The latter is a collaboration with the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation at the George Eastman House, in Rochester, N.Y.
More programs will start up only with increased demand for archivists, which itself depends on a Catch-22: Collections must be made accessible, or researchers and students won’t use them. But if no one uses them, why would administrators allocate the considerable start-up and maintenance costs involved in digitization?
Recently the University of Washington was offered a large archive of local television news programs that tells a lot about the region 50 years ago, but it must weigh whether copyright issues could impede access to the material or complicate media sales that could underwrite maintenance of the collection.
Meanwhile, for campus archivists, triage will continue to be the order of the day. “Doing a solid job of prioritizing will be important,” says Mr. Casey.
Snowden Becker, manager of the master’s-degree program in moving-image-archive studies at the University of California at Los Angeles, worries about scaring off her students when she describes the financial, technical, and copyright issues they will deal with. “I tell them that if they come to the program because they like to watch old movies, they should go get a job in a video store instead.”
If they can still find one.
