{"id":4296,"title":"Video Preservation: Securing the Future of the Past","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/video-preservation-securing-future-past","version":"4578d7bbe921b10ccae007a29f9aaadbe52922b459b7a0b437d1c06d748473de","modified":"2026-09-16T10:53:57.0107797+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Deirdre Boyle"}],"authorKeys":["Deirdre Boyle"],"subjects":["Preservation Texts"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publisher","value":"Media Alliance","url":null},{"label":"Place","value":"New York, NY","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC0180","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Video Preservation: Securing the Future of the Past.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/video-preservation-securing-future-past.","publication":"Deirdre Boyle. Video Preservation: Securing the Future of the Past. Media Alliance. 1993.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/4296.ris"},"links":[{"label":"Scanned document","url":"https://archive.org/details/ETC0180","relationship":"linked document; contents not retrieved","contentType":"application/pdf"},{"label":"Media Alliance","url":"http://www/mediaalliance.org","relationship":"record body link","contentType":null}],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":41832},{"name":"abstract","source":"recorded publication abstract","generated":false,"characters":150},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":874},{"name":"archive_summary","source":"existing ETC archive summaries: ETC0180","generated":false,"characters":150}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"This excerpt concerns the preservation symposium held at the Museum of Modern Art on June 14, 1991. FOREWORD Media Alliance is a nonprofit membership organization that works to develop the media arts field in all its diversity. Activity is divided among the following areas: expanding resources, support and outlets for the independent media arts; facilitating networking and information-sharing about issues and opportunities; and providing programs and services that respond to membership needs. As part of a long-term advocacy plan, Media Alliance launched an initiative to address the critical issue of video preservation in 1991. With advice from a steering committee comprised of members of New York\u0027s media arts community, we have been assessing the state of video preservation, coordinating an exchange of information among interested parties, promoting collaborative solutions to common problems, and stimulating national attention to the issue. We began by identifying over 200 people involved in video preservation. We then surveyed institutions and individuals with video collections around the country, asking respondents to describe their collections and methods of management, their preservation efforts and modes of funding, and their ideas about the critical issues that lay ahead. In partnership with the New York State Council on the Arts, Electronic Media and Film Program, Media Alliance convened a symposium at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on June 14, 1991. Key people concerned about video preservation were invited to discuss their experiences, share information, and make recommendations for the future. To disseminate the information gathered at the symposium, an abbreviated report of the event was published in The Independent (October 1991), the journal of the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers. This publication is an expanded and updated version of that earlier report. We are most grateful for the vision and support of all who participated in this initiative. In particular we wish to thank Deborah Silverfine and Gerald Lindahl of the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), who initiated assistance and advice which continued throughout the project. In addition, we wish to thank: Arthur Tsuchiya and Brian O\u0027Douherty, National Endowment for the Arts (NEA); Julian Low, National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture (NAMAC); Catherine Egan, Consortium of College and University Media Centers (CCUMC); Charles Benton and Larry Kirkman, Benton Foundation; and Sally Jo Fifer, Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC) for responding to our request for funding support. We also wish to thank the presenters at the symposium--Leanne Mella, Elizabeth Scheines, Mark Schubin, David Shulman, and Deborah Silverfine--whose knowledge sparked lively discussion and enthusiastic plans; to Mary Lea Bandy of the Museum of Modern Art, who extended the museum\u0027s hospitality to participants; to MoMA\u0027s Barbara London and Sally Berger, who organized a screening of restored video works; and to Skip Blumberg, Joan Jonas, and Philip Mallory Jones and the other artists whose participation reminded us that the independent perspectives revealed in their work are of central importance to this issue. And finally, a very special thanks to Deirdre Boyle, author and consultant for Media Alliance, who sustained a broad perspective about video preservation issues and eloquently synthesized and articulated this information for our readers. Mary Esbjornson, Executive Director, Media Alliance; Project Director, Video Preservation Initiative SYMPOSIUM ON VIDEO PRESERVATION On June 14, 1991 Keiko Tsuno, co-founder of Downtown Community Television Center (DCTV), left the symposium on video preservation early and hurried home because DCTV was celebrating its twentieth anniversary with a party that evening. When she arrived at the lower Manhattan production center, she discovered a clumsy plumber had put a two-by-four through a pipe, flooding DCTV\u0027s tape archive. Amidst party preparations, staffers scrambled to rescue tapes and set them out to dry. Later that weekend, a fire occurred uptown at public television station WNET. The blaze knocked out phone lines and smoke penetrated basement rooms where videotapes are stored. These near catastrophes dramatically underscored the urgency of video preservation. Whether ominous coincidence or elemental warning, the alignment of these events made it clear: video is an endangered medium. If we are to safeguard video\u0027s multifaceted history, preservation must become a national priority. Over 60 participants from as far away as San Francisco and Toronto gathered in the trustees\u0027 room at the Museum of Modern Art for the day-and-a-half long symposium, organized by the Media Alliance and the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA). Artists, activists, cataloguers, curators, distributors, and librarians attended the event, which began with an evening screening of early video art and documentary tapes selected by MoMA\u0027s Barbara London with Sally Berger. After the screening Joan Jonas, Skip Blumberg, and Philip Mallory Jones spoke briefly on the importance of video preservation from the maker\u0027s perspective. Hoisting an old AV portapak camera in one hand and a wooden hoop she used in early performance tapes in the other hand, Joan Jonas said how grateful she was the audience realized video\u0027s artistic and historic importance. Phil Jones, who organized the Ithaca Video Festival during the Seventies, admitted he had lost track of the whereabouts of much of his own early work. The following day he discovered several archives had copies of tapes he thought were lost forever. His experience pointed up a recurring theme throughout the symposium: the essential preservation partnership between video producers and archivists. Unlike the world of film, which has developed a funding base and core of professionals to carry out its preservation mission, video has yet to develop such an infrastructure. The symposium was the first to convene key figures involved in independent video preservation. Its purpose was to identify and share information about collections; to network information on conservation, cataloging, and archiving techniques; to discuss priorities for future funding and services; and to interface with national archival initiatives. COLLECTION MANAGEMENT The morning session was devoted to issues of collection management and began with a report by this writer on the Media Alliance Survey of Video Collections. Next Elizabeth Scheines, systems manager and coordinator of the Program for Art on Film at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, spoke on how to organize and maintain a video collection. She began by explaining that assessment of a collection--going through the physical material to see what one has--is the first step in figuring out your priorities for preservation. The first component of preservation is to secure a proper storage facility. This need not be a thermal vault, but can begin with an air conditioner in the room where you store your tapes. Next, determine how you want to use your tapes. Even if a collection is just for personal use, she urged thinking of setting it up as a research facility, if only to do your own research. This will make it easier when you want to interface your information with others. The third component is to set up some rudimentary cataloging system (any system is better than none at all). It is enough to begin with a card catalog containing titles, running times, format, artist names, where you acquired it, and where you are keeping it. Start by marking the boxes of all tapes with an accession number. Since some works are unfiled or duplicate other titles in a collection, accession number plus title will make life easier. There are several logical approaches to shelving tapes. If it is your own work, chronological sequence may make sense. If you have a large collection of circulating (or playable) copies, then you will want to shelve this collection separately from your archival masters. Shelving schemes should be designed for maximum access to a collection for users and maximum safety for archival masters: Never shelve circulating and archival collections together. STANDARD SYSTEMS? Although standard cataloging systems are used, most people wind up devising their own. Computer software makes it relatively easy to customize a system. Scheines recommends dBase 3, dBase\u002B and dBase 4. In developing your own system, think ahead to who may be using it, not only today but in the future. You will want to share some information, but not all will be for public knowledge-- eg. acquisition of rights information may be confidential--and this will affect how you program your PC. A good beginning is to be able to generate searches by title, artist, and accession number. Standardized union cataloging systems exist in public libraries and museums, but they are geared to books and art objects, not videotapes. The Library of Congress set up MARC (machine-readable cataloging) as a national standard, and although it has been adapted to film and video, it is not ideal. The National Moving Image Database (NAMID), a project of the National Center for Film and Video Preservation (NCFVP), is a union system expressly designed for video and film. One advantage of interfacing with a union system is the ability to download cataloged information, saving time and effort over original cataloging when it already exists. If your title is a unique property, you may not be able to avail yourself of the time-saving properties of a union catalog, but sharing your information through a national database will help others search for information about tapes you hold. Scheines doubts there will ever be a time when everyone has the same cataloging software and computer hardware, so there is no need to get rid of whatever system you already have. If you are beginning, you may want your computer software compatible with union software (eg. NAMID uses several software packages, including Minaret, which is MARC-compatible). Many wind up with two systems: an idiosyncratic internal cataloging system and a standardized external one, which is costly, inefficient, and cumbersome. But until there is an established, standardized, union cataloging system for video, Scheines recommends having both systems, however unorthodox the suggestion. Standardization needs to be developed if we are to be able to search each other\u0027s databases, Scheines concluded. Being able to share information will help in identifying where tapes are located, deciding how to spend acquisition budgets, developing more targeted funding proposals, facilitating interlibrary loan of circulating tapes, and determining how best to allocate limited time and resources for preservation. VIDEO \u0022TRIAGE\u0022 In the discussion that followed, video artist Tony Conrad raised the dilemma of how to assess a collection when tapes will not play. In response, David Shulman explained his \u0022triage system,\u0022 developed while producing an anthology of early portable video. When presented with a box of historic tapes that refused to play, he grilled the producers, jogging memories about what had been recorded, who shot it, and what was interesting about it. \u0022While you\u0027ll miss things, it\u0027s one way of making decisions about what to restore,\u0022 Shulman confided. Sally Berger, who worked with Shulman on the project, added that some producers are protective of their work and histories and may be reluctant to turn over unique copies of tapes to archivists or curators. Trust needs to be developed between artists and archivists if recuperation of the video past is to occur. Kate Horsfield of the Chicago-based distributor, Video Data Bank, voiced concern about the fate of collections existing outside large institutions. Work already in distribution is most likely to be preserved, she asserted. \u0022What we\u0027re doing is deciding history based on factors we\u0027re living in this minut","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":41832,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}