Welcome To Archives For Creativity

Is fluency in film and sound a new cultural imperative?

The new interactive supplement from the JISC Film & Sound Think Tank is available as part of the Digital Content Quarterly.

It includes essays from the co-chairs of the Think Tank (myself and Peter B. Kaufman), SP-ARK - the new living archive of the works of film maker Sally Potter (maker of Orlando, right), news from the Netherlands Institute Sound and Vision, and a description of the treasures from the Sound Archive at the British Library.

It's free and can be downloaded here.

Mnemosyne opened at The Public in West Bromwich in mid January and has been received with great acclaim.  Ken Russell in The Times described it as “a mind-blowing film that merges documentary and artistic essay in a way that astonishes, confounds and moves”.  For the New Statesman it was “hauntingly mournful, crisply original and utterly seductive”.  Sight and Sound said it was “a focused, intense and visually gorgeous single-screen work”.  John Akomfrah has shown us a way to see familiar and unfamiliar archive in a fresh new light.  Londoners will get a chance to see Mnemosyne at the BFI Southbank in July.  The film is the outcome of Exploring Archives, part of the Made in England season from the BBC and the Arts Council, and project managed by Archives for Creativity.

Japan’s NHK (similar to the BBC) possesses one of the world’s richest television archives.  They have just launched the NHK Creative Library, modelled on the original BBC Creative Archive .  It looks as though they will release up to 3000 clips of tv and audio material, grouped around such themes as wildlife, Japan and the world scene and the environment.  It’s good to see the continuing influence of the Creative Archive concept. 

Mnemosyne is the muse of memory.  It is also the title of John Akomfrah’s “tone poem” on the themes of memory and migration in the industrial West Midlands.  John was awarded the Exploring Archives bursary by the BBC and the Arts Council England as part of their Made in England season.  Mnemosyne is being constructed from source material in the BBC’s television and radio archives, and from other film and sound archives in Birmingham.  It will premiere later this year and I will provide more details as they become available.

Mnemosyne by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Last month the British Library hosted its second conference focusing on the use of internet delivered sound.  Highlights included Charles Leadbeater’s criticism of Digital Britain as more appropriately “a few modest proposals for the limited expansion of broadband” and Sarah Barns describing her ambitious mobile project Sydney Sidetracks.  Peter Robinson shared Oxford University’s experience of joining iTunes U with an ambitious range of podcasts. A report will soon be available on the conference website.

At this Stockholm conference Nicklas Lundblad of Google made a forceful case for renaming “user generated content” as “user created content” and pointing out that its current growth online between 2006 and 2011 is by a factor of 10.  Ben White from the British Library described the challenge of clearing content for the collection of Archival Sound Recordings.  A single item of clearance – just for educational use - could take up to 12 hours of staff time (and that was an optimistic estimate), which raises important questions about the ratio between the cost of clearances and the public value created. I spoke about Public Television Archives: Towards Open Content and a copy of the presentation is available here.

CCStockholm.pdf

It has been at least four years in preparation, but at last the 3000 hours of NewsFilm Online has been launched.  It draws on the archives of both Reuters and ITN to bring 60,000 stories from the coronation of Edward V11 in 1910 to Jade Goody on Celebrity Big Brother in January 2007.  Jon Snow describes it as a “cascade of history” from the last 100 years. The collection is only available for search and browsing by the public, but higher education institutions who subscribe to it can download items.  One day it would be good to see this material available to the wider public, especially if it could be compared with similar news coverage by the BBC.

Welcome news from the BBC with the appointment of Roly Keating as Director of Archive Content.  For too long, the archives at the BBC have been seen as a technology issue, with their advance bound up with the Future Media directorate.  Mark Thompson clearly wants to be seen as the DG who opens up the archives with this decision to put a major creative head in place – and one who will sit on the BBC’s Direction group.  

Let’s hope that Roly quickly resolves the two issues which have dogged previous archive initiatives.  The first is resolution of the “boundary” question with BBC Worldwide and to pin down the necessary commercial windows for an on-demand archive.  The second is to determine whether the scaled up archive plans really requires the intervention of the BBC Trust and a public value test in order to give viewers and listeners access to the programmes they have already paid for.

This was the theme of a workshop organised by Stoffel Debuysere last week in Brussels.  Stoffel works with BOM-VL (Archiving and Distribution of Multimedia in Flanders), the first phase of a project to bring together the valuable digital audiovisual and cultural heritage in Flanders.   

The workshop gathered the key Flemish agencies involved.  There were presentations from Archives for Creativity, from Tobias Golodnoff (DR) on the Danish Cultural Heritage Project, from Marius Arnesen (NRK) on the Norwegian broadcaster’s streaming and download strategy (http://www.nrk.no/tv/), and from Geert Wissink and Johan Oomen on the Dutch Images for the Future project.  

I noted that DR has been successful with Bonanza (“the best and worst from the DR archive”) which allows the audience to vote for which programmes to digitise.  DR have also been successful in implementing the COPY-DAN agreement, where all rights holders have entered into a single contract to release for streaming archive material not cleared in previous agreements.

This presentation was to the Steering Group for the American Archive at its February meeting in Los Angeles, during the IMA conference.  

I was asked to make a presentation on the lessons from the BBC Creative Archive pilot.  

The American Archive is being developed by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and will have at its core the programme content created by PBS TV and radio stations across the United States.   

For a further review of the Creative Archive project click here 

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