Preservation vs. Accessibility in Audiovisual Materials

Paolo Cherchi Usai, the Director of ScreenSound Australia at the National Screen and Sound Arcive, begins the next session. He points to what he calls the death of cinema - the move from traditional audiovisual to digital production in screen and sound. Thus, most of the material produced today can be viewed electronically, via Websites. Audiovisual materials have never been this widely accessible before. This raises problems as well as opportunities, however:

1. Is it true that the Web is going to make accessible more moving images and audiovisual works?
2. Is the Web going to improve the quality of access?
3. Is the issue of accessibility going to interfere with a mandate of preserving materials?

The first answer ist yes; however, the growth of Web archiving will exacerbate the conflict between the urge to create material and the imperative of legal ownership. Archives are being strangled by legal frameworks here; today, their right to archive is being challenged (or indeed besieged), and openly contested. A possible solution for the future may be in the library rather than archive framework; in libraries, freedom of access has been protected from the implications of copyright and legal ownership.

Also, the Web will force curators with selection more than ever before. Originally, archives were supposed to preserve everything; however, today it is no longer possible to do this - far too much content is being produced for archives to be able achieve this. The distinction of what is an archive and what is a museum (or library?) is therefore being challenged; archives need to be curated and selection choices made.

Is the Web going to improve quality of access? Paolo points to the rise of the term 'screen content' in the archive world; this points to a need to archive not only content, but also the audiovisual experience of that content. Web archiving of audiovisual works should preserve the screen experience, but looking at clients' usage of archives this is not necessarily true. The difference between the original audiovisual experience and the experience of the Web-available archive has not been fully understood or been made explicit at this point. Interestingly, the methodological breakthrough in this area might be found in Internet dating and pornography Websites, where users are already able to search for content without declaring an intellectual framework for their search.

Is there an interference of accessibility with the mandate to preserve? Probably, yes. The Library of Congress has now accepted that audiovisual archives cannot preserve everything - they have identified three layers of preservation: best (a need to preserve the original carrier, and then perhaps enable Web accessibility), moderate (preservation either in original form or in Web-accessible formats, subject to curatorial discretion), and efficient (a focus on Web accessibility rather than original preservation).

If deciding for preservation over access, archivists now need to show that by giving access at the detriment of preservation they are losing an asset; they need to stress that the Internet (in its current form) is not forever (which again means long-term preservation rather than short-term accessibility is to be favoured); and they need to point to the question of cost, where preservation may be cheaper than converting for accessibility in ever-changing formats. The challenge remains the same - to create and maintain a structure which is enduring and safe in the long term.