DLF Forum, Philadelphia

Working on my talk. It's about to start.

Later: The organizers posted the pdf, but it lacks my notes, so you will have to interpret the pretty pictures for yourself.

OCA digitization contract

By permission of the Boston Public Library and Internet Archive, here is their book digitization contract.

Venice

I hadn't known what to expect; in fact, that was my perspective on Italy in general.

Venice's feeling of historicity is overwhelming, and it is filled, jammed with tourists, but there are quieter parts where families and children predominate. Built on the lagoon, water is both frame and circulatory system. All public transportation on the center islands is waterborne, and the vaporetti pull up to the dock, disgorge and load passengers, and pull away faster than buses in most cities. When for the first time I exited the railroad station onto the plaza that lay between me and the canal, I saw boats of all shapes and sizes moving in every direction, a crowded, purposeful waterscape, and I found myself overcome with emotion, for I wasn't just lucky enough to see a living relic of the past, I was seeing one possible utopian future, the water city.

Pictures.

Oh, and we hadn't planned our trip to coincide with the Biennale, but there it was, and there were few restrictions on shooting pictures, so.

And one day we went to Gorizia, a border town, and walked into Slovenia.

Pordenone

Here at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto. Pictures accumulating.

Illuminated Corridor last night

This was wonderful.

Our pix; Nicole's pix (great); and check Boltron's panoramas!

And also see Dill Pixels, thenicoleharvey, and Amor de Cosmos.

And, two weeks later, Tara McDowell's review.

Sponsored films arrive in academia

It's a great pleasure to see Anna McCarthy and Dan Streible's syllabus for their Industrial & Sponsored Film & Television course at NYU's Department of Cinema Studies. Long time coming.

With an estimated 300,000 sponsored motion pictures produced in the 20th century, this is clearly the new hegemonic sector of media studies.

Followup: by permission of Anna and Dan, here's the syllabus (in .doc format).

Google co-opting LibraryThing?

Google has rolled out My Library, which looks a lot like a skeletal version of LibraryThing plus an anonymous corporate skin and minus community spirit.

LibraryThing is a massive, participatory catalog of people's private libraries, enabling people to share, tag and review the contents of their collections, collect and contact like-minded people (what better way to find like-minded people than browse their bookshelves?), and put together neat stats.

As of this morning, 265,965 members have catalogued 18,261,561 books. We like LibraryThing and its friendly and open feeling, and hope it lives long and prospers.

Turning the library inside out

Illuminated Corridor is mounting a big event around the library on the evening of October 3. Live music and performative projection will happen in the alley and on the walls of our building, and there will be live musical accompaniment (a new score) to Panorama Ephemera, conducted by Gino Robair.

From their description:

This Corridor seeks to illuminate the Prelinger Library, a private research library open to the public with collections encompassing some 50,000 books, periodical volumes and printed ephemera. The Library is linked to the Prelinger Archive, a collection of ephemeral films that are a key creative resource to artists of the Illuminated Corridor, and serve as a touchstone for the broader community of film, sound and bricolage artists.The Corridor will take place during the Library's traditional Wednesday Open House evening hours, where you are invited to lose yourself in the stacks of an extraordinary library turned inside out for an evening.

Mark your calendars.

Library on the radio and in print

The library's gotten attention lately — Megan and I were on Pacifica's Against the Grain last week (listen here), and In These Times recently published a great piece built around an interview with M.

Internet Archive Collections Blog

I've been remiss in not pointing to the IA's Collections Group blog. It's filled with great posts and pointers to interesting items, including many of our films.

BBC's online archive trial is a big hit

Hannah points me to this Independent piece reporting that the BBC's online archival access project is moving into its second trial phase. The uptake is huge — the call for volunteer testers for the trial brought in 45,000 applications. This testifies to the high level of public interest in archival material. Some of this interest, of course, is purely entertainment-based, but BBC isn't just putting popular reruns online.

Unfortunately, BBC is deploying the iPlayer, which is a Microsoft product employing Microsoft's digital rights management technology, and many people are worried that this locks BBC into a proprietary development cycle and closes the BBC's vast assets to people who decline to use Windows. There's a demonstration about this tomorrow, in fact.

AT&T promoted English-only telephone use (1920)

In a time of great xenophobia and nativism, AT&T took out this ad in Survey, a magazine for social workers and progressive activists, promoting monolingualism on the telephone. "But the telephone is no interpreter," said the ad. "If its far reaching wires are to be effective, those who use them must speak the same language. The telephone best serves those who have become one with us in speech."

Survey and its sister publication Survey Graphic have been digitized.

National Archives/Amazon agreement released

In a rapid FOIA response, NARA has released the partnership agreement between them and Amazon's CustomFlix (now CreateSpace) subsidiary. It's downloadable here (I'm responsible for the poorly derived PDF). I'll be reading and analyzing it soon.

Universal Newsreels on DVD: a first impression

I have just received one of the DVDs containing moving images from the National Archives (NARA) and published by CustomFlix (which has just changed its name to CreateSpace), a subsidiary of Amazon.com. Here are my first impressions.

The DVD, which arrived by mail on the 4th working day after my Amazon order, is a DVD-R bearing an orange printed National Archives/Universal Newsreel logo, thematically similar to the green cover DVD label insert. The disc contains Universal Newsreels from November and December 1960 (200 UN 33, 89-96) and runs exactly 61 minutes.

Neither the disc nor the packaging contain any restrictive wording or copyright notice, nor do they indicate that the material is in the public domain. The compilation of stories seems to follow the structure of NARA's reference videotapes, with which archival researchers will be familiar. This would indicate that no copyrightable authorship exists in the compilation and arrangement, and that the DVD is fair game for duplication and reuse.

The disc runs straight through from start to finish, with no menu or chapters. It begins with the characteristic NARA character-generated title indicating volume, release and story numbers for each issue. As with the NARA reference tapes, this contains just the newsreel stories themselves, lacking the main and end titles contained in the theatrically released newsreels. This is not a deficiency of the disc, but reflects newsreel company practice: individual stories (segments) were filed and cataloged as units, and complete newsreels were typically not kept.

This particular DVD appears to have been made from one of NARA's older (early 1980s?) film-to-videotape transfers. Though others may have more precise information, I'd speculate that the master tape matches the reference tapes that NARA holds in its motion picture research room. These tapes were made in an earlier era of telecine technology and resemble what NARA now calls "non-broadcast video copies." There is a visible flicker, and I saw perceptible dropouts in one story that resemble those caused by physical tape damage, such as when a videotape is ejected without being rewound. At least one story lacks sound, likely because Universal junked many of its tracks before donating the collection to NARA. The quality is certainly adequate for research, some teaching, and personal viewing (in fact, the reference tapes are very often used as a stock footage source for low-budget cable TV documentaries). It is, however, fair to say that this particular DVD will not put many stock footage companies out of business, nor will it delight Blu-Ray and Criterion DVD collectors.

In fairness, the image quality of the "intermediate" videotapes that NARA is furnishing CreateSpace do differ, and this particular tape just happens to reflect the lower end of the quality spectrum. I look forward to seeing DVDs of films transferred more recently, which I know will reflect the level of quality to which we have become accustomed in recent years.

$20 is a great deal for one hour of public domain material that's until now been unavailable through retail channels, and I expect that quite a number of individuals, educational media centers, stock footage companies and production units will begin to "collect 'em all." I also expect that these DVDs will very soon start to show up online.

I look forward to hearing further impressions from others on these products.

Barbara Quint wrote up the NARA/CreateSpace partnership this morning, here.

NARA proposes partnership with Genealogical Society of Utah, posts draft agreement for public comment

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) proposes to partner with the Genealogical Society of Utah (GSU) to digitize and provide public access to certain public records held by NARA.

In a welcome demonstration of transparency, NARA has placed the text of the proposed agreement online and is seeking public comment.

The proposed agreement is nonexclusive and specifies that NARA will get copies of all digitized records GSU creates. It appears that in most cases researchers will have free access to digitized materials on the FamilySearch.org website, though in some cases FamilySearch will have a five-year window to recover costs by charging access fees. During the five-year period, digitized materials will be provided free in NARA's research rooms around the country, and, "in many cases," free online. After five years all restrictions appear to dissolve.

NARA appears to be drafting partnership agreements with the public interest in mind. I urge all interested in the "good terms" issue to review this agreement and comment as you see fit.

National Archives partners with Amazon/CustomFlix

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) today (July 30) announced a partnership with Amazon and its CustomFlix subsidiary to make key public domain films from its collection available on DVD. The DVDs are produced on demand by CustomFlix.

Here's the Washington Post's article, and here's a selection of discs already available. NARA's press release is here.

Unlike the infamous Smithsonian-Showtime deal, this agreement is nonexclusive, and the terms (which, unlike Smithsonian-Showtime, will be based on publicly released principles) have been more carefully crafted so as not to sacrifice public benefit to private gain. I've been told the agreement is publicly releasable, have submitted a FOIA request, and will post here when it's available.

NARA is probably the biggest repository of public domain film and video in the world, with hundreds of thousands of Federal government-produced items, almost all legally exempt from copyright. In addition to government works, it holds a large collection of donated materials, many of which have been placed in the public domain by their donors. These include the Universal Newsreel collection (1929-1967), the only one of six major U.S. newsreel collections that is unencumbered by copyright or contract, and outtakes from the March of Time (1935-1951), the "caviar" of American newsreels. You can watch these for free, but you need to visit NARA's research room in College Park, Md. You can also order broadcast-quality copies, but you can only do so through NARA's official contractors. Some companies sell copies of NARA's public domain material, often poor-quality dupes lacking program notes or contextualization. Others, such as FootageFarm, have invested much time and money creating detailed shotlists and other metadata. Google Video put 101 NARA films online in 2006, but this project doesn't seem to have progressed beyond the initial announcement.

The U.S. is alone among nations in making such a large collection of government-produced audiovisual material freely available. We hope that future partnerships will continue this tradition of public access, and hopefully bring reusable, high-quality digitized video material online so that emerging generations and communities can interpret American history and culture in their own ways.

First visit to the Warburg Library

Start here for post and pictures.

Cardiff: Digitization and Doctor Who

JISC is putting on its e-Content Policy and Strategy Symposium today, and Michelle Pauli is liveblogging it here.

And right out the window is the Wales Millennium Centre, the nexus of Dalek power in several episodes of Doctor Who.

Open Library surfaces

The Open Library, a giant catalog of books/wiki/library discovery tool has gone public. Take a look at the demo. Very cool. This could be the open window on every librarian's desktop, and a significant win for openness and for our shared cultural infrastructure.

The future of moving image archives

I was fortunate to be part of a conversation on a few key issues that custodians of moving images now face. Peter Brantley, my co-convenor (and gracious host of the meeting) undertakes a first summation here.