Archives&Access&Alternatives

Archives&Access&Alternatives
Rick Prelinger
UCLA, May 31, 2013
1Wednesday, June 5, 2013

credentials
So who am I? I've had a hybrid career. I'm going to lay out a brief version of my trajectory, not to tell
you stories, but to background some of the questions I want to propose. A few pieces of data:
I’ve been collecting historical film since 1982, and I still run a private collection of ephemeral film
and home movies. I call it an archives, aware that labels are always in dispute.
I’m also a maker -- I’ve made a bunch of long-form films with archival material, and doing museum
exhibits
I’m writing and talking a lot these days about archival issues and the future of archives.
I’m an outsider librarian in San Francisco
and

Now, I’m not a conventional archivist. Compared to legacy archivists, who might be more like
pastoralists, I'm a hunter-gatherer. From the beginning, I started collecting as an individual, outside
institutional boundaries. My hybrid career is built over a substrate of ephemeral objects. In the
1980s I started collecting material that almost no one else was collecting at the time, that others
were literally throwing away, and named it: ephemeral ﬁlms.

ephemeral films
advertising films
industrial films (production, advertising)
educational films
government films
films made by associations and institutions
persuasion and propaganda
amateur films
home movies
personal, not corporate expression
Ephemeral films were typically made for specific purposes at specific times. They weren’t designed
to be eternal. Sometimes they were even made for a single showing to a single person. When they
became outdated, they were thrown away, or perhaps kept so that the images or sound could be
used in another production. Typically they survive by accident. Perhaps 400,000 to 500,000 such
films (not counting home movies, which are almost infinite) were made between 1927-87. The US is
the richest of the media-rich countries. We throw away more media than most other nations ever
produce.

So I was working as a typesetter in the early 1980s. Friends made Atomic Cafe. Big hit; Heavy
Petting; I was hired as research director. How to find archival films about an idea or the social
Zeitgeist. Began getting interested in films made to manufacture and sustain consensus. Ephemeral
films were perfect.

Service de Ciné-Photographie, L'Office Provincial de Publicité, PQ, ca. 1940s
Getting a start in collecting; first schools, colleges and libraries, then production companies. My
first film was WHEN YOU ARE A PEDESTRIAN, made in 1948 in Oakland, California.

[clip from WHENYOU ARE A PEDESTRIAN]
full ﬁlm at http://archive.org/details/WhenYouA1948

What interested me about this film wasn't just its weird dramaturgy (accidents function as wish-
fulfillment for the viewers) but the background, the periphery of the scenes. The movie documented
the look of Oakland in 1948, a city I was interested in and had once lived in, and the detail was rich
and fascinating. Film as landscape documentation, and more generally, film as evidence.
But soon I realized it would be a good idea to collect preprint materials (explain why), and this drew
me to Detroit: once the epicenter of industrial and sponsored film, no more than 400 railroad miles
from most of American production in the 1920s. Wonderful films were made in Detroit, many of
them for the auto industry. Here is one called "Get Going," from about 1937.

[clip from GET GOING]
http://archive.org/details/0762_Get_Going_04_29_26_00

It's possible to look at this ﬁlm as a kind of parable of industrialization, in the way it's described by
the British historian E.P. Thompson in his essay "Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism."
The engine is the worker, and it takes force and ultimately the regulation of time -- the clock and
the bell -- to get the worker to work.

The collection grew very quickly. In a year it was several thousand films; by the late 1980s it was
tens of thousands of films, and by the late 1990s over fifty thousand completed films (edited films)
plus tens of thousands more cans of unedited materials (outtakes, home movies, actuality
materials, etc.). I began to worry about succession issues, and in 1996 started to look around for a
more permanent home for the collection. In 2002 the Library of Congress acquired the collection,
and since them we have made two more donations, so that the collection now totals some 60,000
titles; about 200,000 cans.

After the LC acquisition I took a break for awhile, but then I listened to many others around me and
realized I should be collecting home movies. This continues, and I've collected about 9,000 of them
by now. Home movies are documents of great density and emotional power, ethnographically thick
and deeply enigmatic. As many of you already know, it is an uncanny, privileged experience to
immerse yourself in the lives of others, and it's not a coincidence I'm referring to the German ﬁlm of
a few years ago; home movies are intimate, private, mysterious. To watch them is to almost
inevitably commit trespass. Of course they also can be extremely long shots of landscape horizons
with few distinguishing features.

Back to the Eighties. I was assembling and running a private collection (with all the limits that
suggests, but also with the freedom it allows), but we were also becoming the default repository for
ephemeral ﬁlm materials. And it was inevitable for us to begin thinking archivally. I started to go to
F/TAAC meetings (the ﬁrst one I attended was here at UCLA in 1986, and I was intimidated as hell),
and later AMIA, and tried to internalize an archival consciousness, mostly by osmosis, because it
was very difficult to go to school and learn it at that time. It was a welcoming community, despite
my somewhat disreputable status as a seller of footage.

Describe: Screenings. Classes and lectures. Laserdiscs, videotapes, later CD-ROMs. Importance of
working with The Voyager Company.
I began to realize I was practicing public history. In an ideal world, this would be hard to distinguish
from archival activity, unless you define archival activity very narrowly. There was a great deal of
public response to my screenings and video releases, and the cultural status of these films started to
migrate from cultish oddities to more serious objects of study and concern. I think ephemeral films
are now in the midst of a third rediscovery, this time by emerging makers and scholars, and I'm
almost ready to watch films like ARE YOU POPULAR? again. It's been hard to look it for a few years.

And in 1999 I moved from NY to SF and came into contact with Brewster Kahle, who had recently
started Internet Archive, and asked me “Want to put your collection online for free?” Since I'd been
living in New York, where information wants to be expensive, I didn’t know how to respond to his
question, but in time I came to think he was right, and I agreed to start putting digitized ﬁlms
online. That was a life-changing event for me. It got me thinking about access to archives in the
broad sense, and wondering why it was so difficult for most people to actually work with archival
material. Slowly, I started thinking of myself as a meta-archivist.

I wanted to talk a little about how my perspectives on working with archival material have evolved,
so I’m going to brieﬂy describe my own “6 stages of archival consciousness.” Perhaps some of you
have experienced these, perhaps in a different order.

Every film is precious
Seduced by style
Overdetermined
Peripheral evidence
An egg is just an egg
Prophesies
Upon discovering the world of what I came to call ephemeral films -- advertising, educational,
industrial and amateur film -- I was bowled over by a sense of new, undiscovered, formative terrain.
Each film was a fount of possibilities, the germ of many possible projects. It was as if each film had
been especially made to be recontextualized. Each contained images and representational strategies
I hadn't encountered in ten years of film study. Every film was precious.

Seduced by style
Overdetermined
Peripheral evidence
Prophesies
As the films accumulated, I became exhausted with the sheer amount of novelty, and started to
focus on style. Style, as I use it here, is purposely a vague umbrella for various phenomenological
attributes that can amuse, captivate or overwhelm: the stentorian sound of a narrator's voice; the
look of original Kodachrome; the body language of Depression-era salesmen; a circular wipe; the
simultaneously familiar and alienating sound of library music; or perhaps the beauty of an old car. I
was preoccupied with style for years. Many of these films can be quite beautiful. And some are
unconsciously subversive. In the following clip from BRIDGING SAN FRANCISCO BAY the relationship
between music and images reminds me of the first few Buñuel films, especially LAND WITHOUT
BREAD and L'AGE D'OR.

Seduced by style
Overdetermined
Peripheral evidence
Prophesies
As I've said, in the mid-1980s I started working with Voyager, which later evolved into Criterion, and did
14 CD-ROMs and laserdiscs, thematic anthologies of material from my collection. This was when I
realized I’d been collecting for a reason. Historically, these films had floated in time, lacking social and
cultural context, aside from the idle thoughts that surfaced while watching them. I became quite
interested in why and when they were made. Who wanted to persuade? Who paid for production? Who
profited? How did they fit into the history of persuasion? And what kind of subjects were they trying to
create or influence? I became focused on these and other sociocultural considerations.

[clip from BRIDGING SAN FRANCISCO BAY]
at http://archive.org/details/Bridging1937
Bridging SF Bay

Seduced by style
Overdetermined
Peripheral evidence
Prophesies
But after awhile I tried to escape sociocultural overdetermination and began to focus on a key
attribute of ephemeral ﬁlm: their value as evidence. Evidentiary value often trumps attributes which
others might characterize as narrative, cinematic, or related to the production/distribution
apparatus. Focusing on evidentiary value sometimes means concentrating on the periphery of the
image, or on details that seem unrelated to the primary concerns of a work. Sometimes it's a
fundamentally anti-cinematic point of view.
Here follows a clip from my new ﬁlm NO MORE ROAD TRIPS?

[clip from forthcoming ﬁlm
NO MORE ROAD TRIPS?]
Peripheral evidence NMRT clip 1

Seduced by style
Overdetermined
Peripheral evidence
Prophesies
And then in 2004 I started to make a feature-length ﬁlm (which I called Panorama Ephemera) and
realized that I'd boxed myself in. I wanted to make a kind of parable about the history of the
European settlement of North America and Western expansion, among other things, and it turned
out that the historicity of the clips themselves prevented me (and the audience) from exercising our
full imaginations. People connected the clips to speciﬁc moments and situations when instead I
wanted them to point to historical and social developments that might even be imaginary.

So I tried, at least tactically, to separate the historicity of ﬁlms from what they actually were
depicting, so that I could use segments to construct alternate or imaginary histories, or comment
critically on histories that had actually happened. I wanted people to look at an egg and see just
that -- an egg, not a Pilgrim's egg or a factory-farmed egg, just an egg. Or to look at a record and
see the grooves rather than the pattern of soundwaves. I wanted to experiment with dehistoricizing
the archives.

[NMRT clip] In my forthcoming film, NO MORE ROAD TRIPS?, I use home movies to reconstruct a
dream trip from the Atlantic to the Pacific. While the source material shows no explicit historical
events, the footage is full of historical traces: the Great Depression, the New Deal, the runup to
World War II and its aftermath, and the massive reconfiguration of the American landscape that
started after 1933 and stepped up during the war and afterwards. Suburbia, sprawl and expansion
into unbuilt areas, and the buildout of the Interstate Highway system. The history isn't
foregrounded, but it is very present in the evidence, and I hope the audience (who is asked to speak
throughout the screening) will share what they see and engage in a kind of crowdsourced
contemplation. Another leading theme in the film is the nature-culture interface, and here is a clip
about that: [bears]

[clip from forthcoming ﬁlm
NO MORE ROAD TRIPS?]
Bears

Seduced by style
Overdetermined
Peripheral evidence
Prophesies
Finally, I realized that an engagement with archives tended to cause people to draw oversimpliﬁed,
mechanistic connections (and boundaries) between past and present. Or they get hung up in
presentism -- describing and judging history from a purely contemporary point of view. This would
never go over with most historians, but most people who watch and work with ﬁlms aren't
historians. I became especially interested in how we regard the past.

East St. Louis, Illinois
Take, for instance, sponsored and government ﬁlms of the Cold War period, with which most of us
are familiar. Rather than characterizing them as documents of past mindsets and persuasions, what
would happen if we regarded them as possibly predictive? How would we look at the models they
promote if we let go of eternalizing the present and realized that they might regain hegemony in
the future?

Why am I going into historiography? Really because I want to underscore that what we think we know
about the potential uses and significance of our materials is only part of the story. Especially for
20th-century media, we tend to circumscribe the possibilities of reuse when we can't begin to
imagine how future generations might think. Could Mathew Brady have predicted that people would
reenact the Civil War? Or could any historically-minded photographer have imagined that their work
might float into a future flaneur's field of vision, reinvoked by a simple geotag? A consequence of
this condition is that we might try to resist tying ourselves to simplistic or limiting ways of telling
stories, because if we do, we may be doomed to use archives in such a way as to fall short of their
potential.

I think this is also true for archivists. Instead of prioritizing familiar preservation workﬂows and
encouraging certain modes of access, we might seek to positively reinforce and reward projects that
play in unfamiliar territory. Such projects could suggest new ways of looking at our materials and
thinking about what they might mean. And we could also let users help us to see our collections and
our work in new ways. We might try to deepen our implicit, ongoing relationship with users such
that it transforms us rather than reinforces the way we already are.

I myself was transformed by the project we undertook with Internet Archive, which was exposed to
the public at the end of 2000, when we cobbled together a website and put up 1001 films in mpeg2
format. There was relatively little broadband in the US, and it was difficult for most people to work
with the files. They were quite huge, 28MB/minute. Now this seems like almost nothing.
Now 4100 titles; an estimated 70-80 million views/downloads
Changed the nature of how many people access and use historical film footage
Now trying to do same with home movies; 3000 coming up.

These were PD materials. Explain CC licenses. Explain deriv works. Etc.
Copyﬁghts.
Big ﬁght coming up? The new Register of Copyrights, Maria Pallante, has announced an effort to
open up the law for rewrite. Extended collective licensing -- fair use -- anti-circumvention? It will
not be pretty.

So now we follow a model that some call "freemium" -- explain -- which is imperfect but fairly
functional. This allows us to keep the doors open. It makes smaller projects possible, but not grand
ones. You might recognize this situation yourselves. And we are just one of many small collections;
we happen to be private, but we try to have a public impact by opening our holdings as much as we
can. But we need to ﬁgure out how we can do more to infuse our presentist culture with a sense of
history, and encourage moving image authorship (and other kinds of creation) on a mass level. We
can't do this with tiny bits of stock footage income. It would be like running a library on the revenue
from copy machine cards.

So here's where I want to ask a few questions. In general these aren't the same ones I've been
asking for the past several years. And while I might have some opinions, but I don't really have
answers.

The turn to digital has forced librarians and archivists into a Faustian bargain. We now have no
alternative but to digitize our collections for access, and we're pretty much forced to reformat
analog materials to digital. And the fragility of digital objects turns archives into permanent rehab
centers for at-risk bits. This forces us to rework priorities, budgets, workﬂows and self-images so
that we can become nodes of digitization and access. This pushes us forward, but it also sets us
back. Expanded access to collections is a dramatic win.

But there are other implications, which I'd like to focus on today. We might think of today's theme as
"radical traditionalism."

Why do we do what we do?
Most moving image archives (and many collections of materials in other media) are accidental. They
sprouted up to address problems that existed at speciﬁc times -- principally when someone resisted
what often seems to be the natural destiny of moving images, which is to be thrown away. It's only
in recent years that archives speciﬁcally focused on collecting moving images have been established.

But it is difficult to collect moving images. Asserting that we can permanently hold and preserve
materials ﬁxed in physically ephemeral forms is a kind of conceit. And it isn't always clear why we
are keeping what we keep. Policy-based acquisitions often cause material to be kept that's of less of
interest than other material we do not acquire or retain. (When we read stories about archival
material in the mainstream media, they're often concerned with material that survived IN SPITE OF
being ignored or neglected, IN SPITE OF the work archivists do.)

Many, perhaps most of the decisions we make to acquire, accession and preserve materials are
based on cinephilia. I love home movies myself, but unconditional love does not foster consciously
critical archival policies.
Should we stratify our collecting so that a portion of the material we acquire and retain is extrinsic
to our collecting policy? In other words, collect things we would NOT otherwise collect, or collect by
chance?

We're seeing an interesting twist on unthought acquisitions policies as we gear up to collect digital
materials at scale. At a certain point, probably in the last decade, a realization settled on [many of
us] that it was now technologically feasible to collect a great deal of the digital materials that were
being published or placed on the open web. Perhaps not economically or physically possible for
everyone yet, but feasible from the technical POV. This then quietly gave birth to the idea that is now
widely held that we should. No sense of selection or reason for collecting everything. But the
difficulties incumbent in collecting and preserving digital materials are causing us to neglect analog
accumulations.

And this is giving rise to a new question that fascinates me: Do physical objects have the right to
exist? [discuss]

San Francisco Chronicle, 1915-09-14 (hard copy)

Personal records: a new frontier
How can institutional archives integrate personal and institutional materials? (explain)
We have focused on the fonds [the organizational scheme inherited from institutions whose records
we hold] rather than the ﬂavor. The two kinds of collections constitute two oppositional, yet
codependent, ways of addressing the past.
There is a growing asymmetry in the historical record, especially in a time when it is starting to
become widely recognized that institutional histories fall far short of documenting lived and social
experience. The "digital turn" may ultimately be less wrenching to archives than the challenge of
merging personal and institutional. But I think we must take it on. There's no way we can simply
collect and display mass media, institutional and government records and call that history. We have
to merge the collective and the personal.

Making room for personal records in institutional collections, but even more than that, pushing
them to resonate, collide and hybridize, has interesting implications for research, and, to make
what could be a long story very short, might well create many new stakeholders interested in
assuring a long life for collections.

http://beetrooted.ﬁles.wordpress.com/2011/09/permacultureprinciples1.jpg
Could we experiment with paradigms coming from other areas that may have relevance to the
archives? Bill Mollison & David Holmgren: permaculture principles
1. Observe and interact: By taking time to engage with nature we can design solutions that suit our particular situation.
2. Catch and store energy: By developing systems that collect resources at peak abundance, we can use them in times of need.
3. Obtain a yield: Ensure that you are getting truly useful rewards as part of the work that you are doing.
4. Apply self-regulation and accept feedback: We need to discourage inappropriate activity to ensure that systems can continue to
function well.
5. Use and value renewable resources and services: Make the best use of nature's abundance to reduce our consumptive behavior
and dependence on non-renewable resources.
6. Produce no waste: By valuing and making use of all the resources that are available to us, nothing goes to waste.
7. Design from patterns to details: By stepping back, we can observe patterns in nature and society. These can form the backbone of
our designs, with the details ﬁlled in as we go.
8. Integrate rather than segregate: By putting the right things in the right place, relationships develop between those things and they
work together to support each other.
9. Use small and slow solutions: Small and slow systems are easier to maintain than big ones, making better use of local resources
and producing more sustainable outcomes.
10. Use and value diversity: Diversity reduces vulnerability to a variety of threats and takes advantage of the unique nature of the
environment in which it resides.
11. Use edges and value the marginal: The interface between things is where the most interesting events take place. These are often
the most valuable, diverse and productive elements in the system.
12. Creatively use and respond to change: We can have a positive impact on inevitable change by carefully observing, and then
intervening at the right time.

-- Relational art & social practice
A current trend (though it actually dates back over 20 years) in the arts is to make projects whose
goal is to create community and change through shared activity and experience. We argue that we
do this with our library of printed materials in SF, creating community around a collection and the
transactions that spring up between users, librarians, and materials. This is a big stretch for archives
since it internalizes a process that is usually thought to occur outside the institution -- that
consciousness is changed as a result of encounters with materials or authorship using materials.
And of course the implication that there's a natural hop-skip-jump from collecting to community to
change is complex. But I would argue that museums and galleries already engage in this process,
and there is no reason why more archivally oriented institutions can't as well.

-- Participation, making participatory spaces? There are many ways to think about this. I am drawn,
from my own experience, to transforming archives into workshops. To bringing the process of
making derivative and archives-focused works into the archives, instead of fostering a takeout
culture.
There is a whole literature on participation -- see Nina K Simon, The Participatory Museum.
You already have an environment here that could serve this, the Research Commons. Can we build a
research commons around archival material? Or can we bring archival material into common spaces
for study and work?

If archives skew toward becoming digitizing centers and portals for digital material, what's the
action going to be at the archives itself? (This isn't a new question, of course. The process research
libraries have been going through for the past decade preﬁgures the current battles about MOOCs
-- what ought to happen remotely, and what needs to happen f2f on campus?)

I raise this because of our admittedly microcosmic, but riveting experiences with a little outsider
library in San Francisco. [discuss further]
explain library and its experience

Could archivists do archives like scientists do science? At the very least, could we open ourselves to
making experiments in preservation, access, documentation and transformation, rather than
repeating commonly accepted workﬂows time and again? And could we test our hypotheses against
reality as we perceive it? Can we infuse the arts & humanities with a sense of the scientiﬁc method?
For instance, what if we borrowed from environmental practice, and create an expectation that we'd
write preservation impact statements and access impact statements prior to undertaking new
projects? [explain]

Can we bring nonprofessionals into the back of the archives to work with materials, annotate, repair,
conserve, prepare for scanning and remediate backlogs? We've done this with digital collections, but
can we build what I'm calling participatory physical archives?

We've been doing this in San Francisco for a bit more than a year (explain).
Good results, disappointing ones.

As I've said, can we experiment? And can we do so without upfront funding? One of the
characteristics of the for-profit tech sector, which has become our competition, is that it makes
tools and services before figuring out the financial model that might obtain. Perhaps more relevant,
this is true for individuals who write open-source code and develop tools. These days people make
things, and if they catch on they figure out how to fund them. Can we give people a little paid time
to make something new and see whether it might work?
How can we make Darwinism into a friend rather than an enemy?

I have often wanted to run an archives like the legendary Valve Corporation, a game developer in
Bellevue, Wash. What if people could pick what projects they worked on?
But lack of practicality aside, could we open our objectives to discussion?

Modest objectives:
1. Move nontraditional materials into archival mainstream
2. Accelerate pace of traditional research, scholarly and
educational use of home movies and ephemeral films
3. Encourage new areas & forms of scholarship, esp. digital
4. Build accessible corpus of reusable footage
5. Move from boutique approach; open up massive amounts
of material
6. Teach machines to watch moving images
7. Skew online moving image environment away from more
established genres (YouTube did this, but retreated)
8. Encourage evolution of archival workflow & practice by
problematizing legacy practices
Here is one set of possible objectives:
1. Move nontraditional materials, especially ephemeral films into archival & cultural mainstream
2. Accelerate pace of traditional research, scholarly and educational use of home movies and
ephemeral films
3. Enable new areas & forms of scholarship, incl. digital
4. Build corpus of reusable footage
5. Move from boutique approach; open up massive amounts of material
6. Enable automated & machine analysis -- teach machines to watch moving images
7. Skew online moving image environment away from more traditional genres (perhaps already
happened)
8. Geocodes, tropes, archaeology
9. Encourage evolution of archival workflow & practice by
problematizing legacy practices

I'm going to end with a little case study on transformative use. Here are a couple of clips from our
of our most boring ﬁlms, AMERICAN THRIFT (1962), made by JHO for Chevrolet; it calls itself a
"tribute to the woman American." While it is well shot, its images are sanitized and uninteresting,
and its narration wouldn't have been out of place in the 1890s.

[clip from AMERICAN THRIFT]
http://archive.org/details/American1962
http://archive.org/details/American1962_2
AMERICAN THRIFT

And here's what a British video artist and music video maker named Cyriak Harris made from that
ﬁlm, which he downloaded at medium-low resolution from our collection at Internet Archive. It's a
clip for the band named Bonobo. In its dopiness I think it achieves a kind of transcendence.

Bonobo Cirrus Video
http://archive.org/details/bonobocirrus
BONOBO CLIP

rick@archive.org
@footage

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