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Institutional Perspectives on Storage

Moderator: William C. Uricchio
Claude Mussou Pelle Snickars Richard Wright: April 25, 2009; Running Time: 1:17:23

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

European archivists grapple with the legal obligations, civic responsibilities and future prospects of their collections, which, thanks to the Internet and other new technologies, are increasingly awash in image and sound. As William Urichhio notes, “tradition-bound institutions know what we should be gathering: feature films, books, newspapers, political documents, but it’s much harder to know what to do with things like social media…say, networks of interactions.” Different organizations are evolving diverse strategies.

At France’s National Institute of the Audiovisual (INA), Claude Mussou describes managing “memory and heritage policies in the information age.” In the 16th century, she recounts, Francois 1 mandated that any book published would be first deposited in the royal library. The national collection law broadened over centuries to include new forms of knowledge production: documents, film, radio and TV, and beginning in 2006, websites, because of the migration of so many activities online, and because of the fleeting life of many websites. Says Mussou, “Twenty, 50 or 100 years from now, when scholars or academics look for evidence and testimony for what the 21st century was,…web archives will be a necessary and valuable source.” She pointedly notes that we can’t rely on Google or other commercial interests to maintain web archives, and therefore governments must not “surrender their role as gatekeepers to collective memory.”

Sweden’s national library recently merged with the national media archive, says Pelle Snickars, which includes seven million hours of media material. The legal deposit law mandates anything put out on tape, radio or TV must find its way into the state’s collections. This imposes an enormous burden, both curatorial and budgetary. As it transitions to digital, the library must maintain its analog collection. Snickars says the larger problem involves rights: researchers would love access via the web to the material that’s being transferred, but the material belongs to others. Snickars worries about the best methods for digital preservation, and whether quality concerns should be sacrificed to quantity demands, as more and more people assume access to information online.

The BBC boasts 100 kilometers of shelves for its A/V collection, says Richard Wright, from 1920s radio to videotape from the 1960s onward -- all of which must be digitized to be preserved. The BBC is converting 200 terabytes per week of current broadcast material -- an enormous commitment to digital. As Wright points out, “We’re putting a very big egg in that basket, and the basket is not perfect.” The risk of loss of data is proportional to the data stored, and since so much is pouring from analog to digital, “the risk is growing by Moore’s Law.” One way to mitigate this loss: avoid compressing data, and seek redundancy. As we’ve moved from stone, to paper, and onto disc, storage capacity gets denser and cheaper, he notes -- almost overwhelming: “It’s why our grandchildren are swimming in a sea of digital photos.” If we can’t tag all this material appropriately, it will be “struggling to survive” for future generations.

Lecture Details

Location: Wong Auditorium

“Twenty, 50 or 100 years from now, when scholars or academics look for evidence and testimony for what the 21st century was, or cultural trends, historical events or debates that stirred society at the time, web archives will be a necessary and valuable source.”

Claude Mussou

About the Speakers

Moderator: William C. Uricchio

Co-Director, Comparative Media Studies Program and Professor of Comparative Media Studies, MIT Professor of Comparative Media History, Utrecht University, the Netherlands

William Uricchio received his Ph.D. in cinema studies from New York University in 1982 and comes to MIT from the Institute for Media and Re/Presentation at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, where he was department chair. He currently directs a five-year cultural identity project in the European Science Foundation Changing Media Changing Europe initiative.

A Fulbright and Humboldt fellow, Uricchio has published widely on early television, early cinema and their emergence as cultural forms, including Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph Quality Films(1993); Die Anfänge des deutschen Fernsehens: Kritische Annäherungen an die Entwicklung bis 1945 (1993); The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His Media (1991); and "The Nickel Madness": The Struggle to Control New York City’s Nickelodeons in 1907–1913. His most recent books include Media Cultures (2006 Heidelberg), on responses to media in post 9/11 Germany and the US, and We Europeans? Media, New Collectivities and Europe (forthcoming).

Claude Mussou

Project Coordinator, Web legal deposit, INA-France

Claude Mussou has master's degrees in American studies and journalism from the Sorbonne. Mussou is also a member of the FIAT / IFTA Television Studies Commission.

Pelle Snickars

Head of Research, National Library of Sweden

Pelle Snickars received his Ph.D. in 2001, and has since devoted his research to media historical issues in relation to archival practices. With Patrick Vonderau, he is preparing an international anthology on the richest repository of popular culture on the web – The YouTube Reader.

Richard Wright

Preservation specialist, BBC Archive

Richard Wright has led and participated in various research projects at the European level since 1995, including Euromedia, Amitica, Presto, PrestoSpace, Birth of Television, Video Active, Semedia and PrestoPRIME. He is the author of the PrestoSpace Preservation Guide and has worked in acoustics, speech and signal processing for US and UK Government research laboratories, University College London, Royal National Institute for the Deaf, and Cirrus Research.