Media Archival Studies

Appraising Moving Images is a practical guide to archival and monetary appraisal of moving images for anyone who has responsibility for moving image collections.

Archival Film Curatorship is the first book-length study that investigates film archives at the intersection of institutional histories, early and silent film historiography, and archival curatorship. It examines three institutions at the forefront of experimentation with film exhibition and curatorship.

This book offers a unique window on the world of film archiving. The author brings a historical, economic, and social framework to bear upon this unique community, looking at the people, institutions, and corporations that play key roles in the preservation endeavor. Through ethnographic narratives that place the reader squarely within the scene, Gracy gives readers the context to understand fully the complexities of film archiving work, and what it means to be a member of this profession. Provides an introduction to the major players in the film community and the internal and external forces that influence film preservation, as well as a background of the film preservation movement. The book also addresses the constraints of funding, intellectual property issues, and the orphan film movement. The primary focus is on the relationships among the various players: archives, studio and film preservation labs, and content owners. The book draws material from the Gracy's field work. Some of the issues discussed include The great flexibility in how archivists use the term preservation How much control do archivists really have over film preservation Does archival imperative trump the physical imperative?

For many libraries, museums, and archives the hardest step in preserving film collections is getting started. The Film Preservation Guide is designed for these organizations. It introduces film preservation to nonprofit and public institutions that have collections of motion picture film but lack information about how to take care of them. Written and produced by the National Film Preservation Foundation, the book is a primer for “beginners”—professionals trained in archival studies, librarianship, museum work, or history but unschooled in this technical specialty.

Film Style and Technology is a history of film style and its relationship to film technology. It also includes a theory of film analysis and demonstrates this theory using the films of Max Ophuls.

This publication is the first ever book dedicated to the topic of film preservation and restoration to have been published in India. The aim is to create awareness about the topic in India, and to take stock of our country’s endangered film patrimony. The book brings together articles by some of the world’s leading preservation experts and archivists, who provide an introduction to the field, describing its ethical and practical dimensions, and discussing current approaches to film archiving.

Film is in a state of rapid change: the transition from analog to digital is profoundly affecting not just filmmaking and film distribution but a number of other facets of the industry, including the ways in which films are archived. In From Grain to Pixel--the first volume in the new Framing Filmseries from Amsterdam University Press--Giovanna Fossati brings together scholars and archivists to discuss their theories on digitization and to propose new possibilities for future archives.

Based on the experiences of members of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) and published by the FIAF Secretariat, Brussels, 1991.

The first international anthology to explore the historical significance of amateur film, Mining the Home Movie makes visible, through image and analysis, the hidden yet ubiquitous world of home moviemaking. These essays boldly combine primary research, archival collections, critical analyses, filmmakers' own stories, and new theoretical approaches regarding the meaning and value of amateur and archival films.

The manipulation of pictures and video in digital form has been an established research activity for more than twenty years. This book introduces the reader to a range of digital restoration activities beyond the well traversed areas of noise reduction and deblurring. It describes a number of problems associated with archived film and video.

This text provides a thorough introduction into the history and theory of moving image film, video, sound recording and allied technologies.

This study looks at the preservation process: newsreel, television, and color preservation; the often controversial issue of colorization; and commercial film archives. It also provides detailed histories of the major players in the preservation battle including the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, the American Film Institute, the Museum of Modern Art, the UCLA Film and Television Archive, and the Library of Congress.

Recommendations of the Librarian of Congress in consultation with the National Film Preservation Board.

This is the first book to bring together the work of a modern motion picture film laboratory together with the specialist techniques for preservation and restoration of archival film. The books data has its origins in a training programme called FILM which was written by members of the Gamma Group with funding from the EU fund Force. The committee comprised senior film archivists and technicians in charge of film conservation departments or working film laboratories within national film archives, together with technicians from commercial laboratories which specialise in archival film conservation and who do not work for national and local archives. Restoration of Motion Picture Film is an extremely informative, well-researched book which is an unmissable addition to the bookshelves of conservators, archivists and curators worldwide.

Saving Cinema narrates the development of the preservation movement and lays bare the factors that have influenced its direction. Archivists do more than preserve movie history; they actively produce and codify cinematic heritage. At the same time, digital technologies have produced an entirely new reality, one that resists the material, artifact-driven approach that is the gold standard of preservation in the Western world. As it has become increasingly easy to capture and access moving images, increasing evidence of something many archivists have known for years has emerged: industrial and training films, amateur travel diaries, and even family videos are critical public resources. Is access equivalent to preservation, and, if it is, how should archivists alter their activities? Saving Cinema is the book to guide that conversation.

Commissioned for and sponsored by the National Film Preservation Board. David Pierce has taken a major step toward resolving one of the most intractable problems in the field of film preservation: determining, with certainty, how many of the films produced in the United States during the twentieth century survive today. Mr. Pierce has also created a valuable database of location information on the archival film holdings identified in the course of his research (see www.loc.gov/film/).

This Film Is Dangerous is an anthology published by the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) to examine and to celebrate the life, the death, the afterlife, and the mythology of nitrate film. It incorporates the papers given at the symposium The Last Nitrate Picture Show during the FIAF Congress in London in June 2000, as well as a wealth of original contributions by historians, archivists, veterans, and enthusiasts around the world.

Since the days of early television, video has been an indispensable part of culture, society, and moving-image media industries. In this history, Michael Z. Newman casts video as a medium of shifting value and legitimacy in relation to other media and technologies, particularly film and television. Video has been imagined as more or less authentic or artistic than movies or television, as more or less democratic and participatory, as more or less capable of capturing the real.

This book offers an up-to-date survey of the present state of affairs in Audiovisual Translation, providing a thought-provoking account of some of the most representative areas currently being researched in this field across the globe. The book discusses theoretical issues and provides useful and practical insights into professional practices. The contributors to the collection cover a wide array of topics from subtitling, dubbing, and voiceover, to media accessibility practices like sign language, subtitling for the deaf and the hard of hearing, and audio description for the blind and visually impaired.

With contributions from leading recording engineers, researchers, and industry experts, Immersive Sound includes an in-depth description of the physics and psychoacoustics of spatial audio as well as practical applications. Knowledge of the development, theory, and practice of spatial and multi-channel sound is essential to those advancing the research and applications in the rapidly evolving fields of 3D sound recording, augmented and virtual reality, gaming, film sound, music production, and post-production.

With contributions from leading scholars across several disciplines, Living Stereo re-tells the history of twentieth-century aural and musical culture through the lens of stereophonic sound.

Music Preservation and Archiving Today moves beyond the how-to and assembles the work currently being done to preserve music and "scenes" via essays, case studies, and overviews of work by academic archives as well as community driven preservation projects.

The National Recording Preservation Plan has been devised to provide a blueprint to "implement a comprehensive national sound recording preservation program," as mandated in the National Recording Preservation Act of 2000. Technological, institutional, and legal impediments to broadened access create daunting challenges for the national preservation effort. This plan identifies the audio field's most important preservation and access problems and offers recommendations for surmounting them.

David L. Morton examines the process of invention, innovation, and diffusion of communications technology, using the history of sound recording as the focus. Off the Record demonstrates how the history of both the hardware and the ways people used it is essential for understanding why any particular technology became a fixture in everyday life or faded into obscurity.

Tracing the contours of this history, Greg Milner takes us through the major breakthroughs and glorious failures in the art and science of recording.

This publication presents the results of research and development carried out by the Sound Directions project with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities in the U.S. Each chapter in this document is divided into two major parts: a preservation overview that summarizes key concepts for collection managers and curators, followed by a section intended for audio engineers, digital librarians, and other technical staff that presents recommended technical practices while summarizing our findings and experience.

In July 2003, many of the key stakeholders in audiovisual preservation met at the University of Texas at Austin to share their experiences and discuss the challenges ahead, specifically in the area of preserving sound recordings. In this publication, ARL presents the symposium papers and these recommendations for future action.

The authors have produced a study outlining the web of interlocking issues that now threaten the long-term survival of the sound recording history. This study tells everyone that major areas of America's recorded sound heritage have already been destroyed or remain inaccessible to the public. It suggests that the lack of conformity between federal and state laws may adversely affect the long-term survival of pre-1972-era sound recordings in particular.

This report offers recommendations to help ensure the physical and intellectual well-being of born-digital materials transferred from donors to archival repositories. The report surveys the primary issues and concerns related to born-digital acquisitions and is intended for a broad audience with varying levels of interest and expertise, including donors, dealers, and repository staff.

Content and media asset management systems are core back office applications of the modern day broadcaster, yet there is little information available on the control and management of these systems and how content can be delivered over a variety of different channels: television, iTV, internet, webcasting, mobile phones and wireless PDAs. This book explains the potential for applying asset management systems to content creation models for distribution over a variety of outlets and the benefits gained from increased efficiency and lowering of costs.

Archives and special collections departments have a long history of preserving and providing long-term access to organizational records, rare books, and other unique primary sources including manuscripts, photographs, recordings, and artifacts in various formats. The careful curatorial attention to such records has also ensured that such records remain available to researchers and the public as sources of knowledge, memory, and identity. Digital curation presents an important framework for the continued preservation of digitized and born-digital collections, given the ephemeral and device-dependent nature of digital content. With the emergence of analog and digital media formats in close succession (compared to earlier paper- and film-based formats) came new standards, technologies, methods, documentation, and workflows to ensure safe storage and access to content and associated metadata.

The Digital Dilemma, published in 2007, raised important concerns about the longevity of digital motion picture materials created by the major Hollywood studios, as well as other valuable digital data managed by large commercial, scientific and government organizations.

In its landmark report, The Digital Dilemma, the Academy’s Science and Technology Council examined ways in which key players in the movie business and other major industries currently store and access important digital data. The goal was to better understand what problems these industries face today and what, if anything, is being done to avoid full-fledged data access disasters down the road.

Film archives are fast spreading around the world, and with them issues surrounding archival digitisation, artistic appropriation, and academic reinterpretation of film material that demand scholarly attention. This book not only throws light on unexplored issues related to film archives but also introduces unconventional approaches and alternative sources for scholarly research and a vast range of artistic possibilities.

Film is in a state of rapid change: the transition from analog to digital is profoundly affecting not just filmmaking and film distribution but a number of other facets of the industry, including the ways in which films are archived. In From Grain to Pixel--the first volume in the new Framing Filmseries from Amsterdam University Press--Giovanna Fossati brings together scholars and archivists to discuss their theories on digitization and to propose new possibilities for future archives.

The Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) has placed online the full text of its handbook for use by museums, libraries, and archives in preparing to digitize collections. The handbook covers topics such as considerations for project management, technical and copyright issues, vendor relations, selecting materials for scanning, and guidelines from case studies.

Digital preservation has become culturally, as well as economically, indispensable. The preserving of business processes is an emerging challenge for each company, regardless of industry sector and size. This book focuses on the legal aspects of digital preservation and offers legal guidance in that area. This important book illustrates the implications of preservation actions on intellectual property rights and data protection.

This ground-breaking edited collection explores the challenges of preserving complex digital objects such as simulations, visualisations, digital art and video games. This book will cover topics such as the legal and technical challenges of preservation, curation and authority, and digital archaeology. Written by international experts from a broad background of library, collecting institutions, information and computer science, and digital preservation backgrounds, this collection showcases the state of the art of the discipline and brings together stakeholder perspectives from across the preservation community.

The anthology is organized into sections that explore remix studies and digital humanities in relation to topics such as archives, artificial intelligence, cinema, epistemology, gaming, generative art, hacking, pedagogy, sound, and VR, among other subjects of study.

In the first section of the book, Owens synthesizes work on the history of preservation in a range of areas (archives, manuscripts, recorded sound, etc.) and sets that history in dialogue with work in new media studies, platform studies, and media archeology. In later chapters, Owens builds from this theoretical framework and maps out a more deliberate and intentional approach to digital preservation. A basic introduction to the issues and practices of digital preservation, the book is anchored in an understanding of the traditions of preservation and the nature of digital objects and media. Based on extensive reading, research, and writing on digital preservation, Owens's work will prove an invaluable reference for archivists, librarians, and museum professionals, as well as scholars and researchers in the digital humanities.

Covering digital video, film and even DSLR still cameras with video capabilities, two award winning filmmakers and teachers address all aspects of filmmaking.