Future-proof? How Audiovisual Archives Adopt Digital

Technologies

Thomas Nachreiner

Abstract Taking up media philosopher Frank Hartmann's notion that ‘right now,

digital culture does not mean to synthesize new cultures through new

technologies, but merely to translate the traditional repositories of knowledge

into digital technology”1, this paper scrutinizes the implications of the

digitization of film and television stocks within a framework of cultural

change. Beginning with the role of the archive in modern culture, the first

part of this paper highlights its conceptual alteration against the background

of technical change. In Section Two the potential impact of digital

technology on professional film and television archives will be described.

This chapter thereby aims to outline different characteristics of digital

technologies and how they are implemented as innovations in the system of

audiovisual (re-)production. Section Three then distinguishes different

development strategies due to the varying provenience of archives such as the

German Bundesarchiv Filmarchiv as a public institution and the British ITN

Source as a private corporation. Finally, Section Four aims at explaining the

continuities and discontinuities as a reciprocal permeation of technologies

and institutions. Drawing on the examples of ITN Source and the Chronos-

Media archive it is argued that there are precise distinctions to be made as

realisation is highly dependent on the specific structures of the environment it

takes place in.

Key Words: Digitization, film archive, television archive, media

archeology, cultural memory, mediology, cultural heritage, online

distribution.

*****

1. Archives and Culture Pointing at the contemporary change in archiving techniques

Jacques Derrida states that ‘riens n'est moins sur, rien n'est moins clair

aujourd'hui que le mot d'archive.’2 While in his Foucauldian notion of

‘archive’ Derrida rather emphasizes the concept than the institution, German

media historian Wolfgang Ernst takes on the idea of confusion on an

institutional level. According to Ernst, electronically stored media virtually

erase the traditional distinction between archive, library, and museum and

thus trigger the dissolution of the archive as the primary repository of

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knowledge and culture.3 According to Paul Voss and Marta Werner, even the

archive as such is said to disappear:

On the cusp of the twenty-first century - now - we speak of an

ex-static archive, of an archive not assembled behind stone

walls but suspended in a liquid element behind a luminous

screen; the archive becomes a virtual repository of knowledge

without visible limits, an archive in which the material now

becomes immaterial.4

Combining these positions one might conclude that with the merging of

memorial institutions of different origin and their use of digital technologies,

the concept of the archive itself loses its dominant imprint on memorial

culture and gives way to other defining concepts such as, for instance, the

database.

However, while digital technologies in general, and databases in

particular present an overarching organisational innovation, it is by no means

the first transformation the archive has undergone. Derived from the Greek

αρχειου with its notions of government and provenance, the Latin word

‘archive’ in the modern era has come to refer not only to public records but

also to the entire corpus of material remains the past has bequeathed to the

present.5 Three crucial aspects lend themselves to the differing interpretations

of the concept as noticed by Derrida: First, with the French Revolution and

the surrounding turmoil throughout Europe, royal archives lost their direct

connection to political power, enabling the development of academic

historiography.6 From this point on, archives were no longer restricted to a

judicial legitimatization of political order, but additionally functioned as a

system of historical documentation. Second, non-state institutions such as

newspapers or private corporations started building their own archives – a

field widely ignored by traditional archive studies focusing almost

exclusively on public records.7 And third, media of technical reproduction –

photography soon followed by audio recording, film and video – extended

the scope of the archives from printed records to all kinds of material, and

simultaneously introduced new technical and legal problems.8 While classical

notions of originality are undermined by the technologies of reprography and

mechanical reproduction, the archiving of audiovisual materials in particular

also seems to oppose the classic concept of the archive as a stable and closed

off repository: their final purpose is their instantaneous diffusion in the

spatial dimension, rather than legitimizing or documenting the operations of a

certain institution.9 In this sense, the blurred distinction between library and

archive is not necessarily due to the capacities of electronic and digital

storage, but is already inherent to the very disposition of moving images in

their hybrid state as consumer goods and communication media.

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As this short disgression shows, archive history is not restricted to

technical issues, but is situated in densely interwoven political, economic,

and legal strands. Whereas the current transformation of the archive thus can

hardly be reduced to a matter of technological innovation, it has to be

associated with the simultaneous developments in media and society. In

reverse, the digitization of audiovisual archives is neither an isolated nor a

solely technical phenomenon, but rather an indicator of larger developments

– not least regarding cultural change: Since, following Aleida Assmann,

archives as memorial institutions are located at the interface of a society’s

cultural memory, they form the basis of diachronic cultural transmission by

connecting the external storage memory with the discursive functional

memories of society.10

Putting it differently, to investigate the transformation

of the archive means to look at the transformation of the preconditions of

societal memory and thus a society’s memorial culture.

This focus shall be further specified by drawing on the media-

archeological approach of German media theory, as adopted by Marcus

Burkhardt in his analysis of the Internet Archive.11

Wolfgang Ernst, for

instance, draws on Michel Foucault’s notion of the archive, understood as the

‘system of formation and transformation of statements.’12

However, in

contrast to Foucault, whose concept is meant as a category of discourse

theory and is thus not explicitly applicable to distinct institutions and specific

collections, media archeology extends the concept to the technological level

and subsequently locates the forms of memory in the operations of storing,

processing, and transmitting information.13

Thus, the essential analogy

between these concepts lies in describing processes of continuity,

modification, and update which ressemble the modus operandi of media

systems in general and media archives as their subsystems in particular. In

this sense, the audiovisual archive collects and selects material for continual

storage, modifies it through its organisational strategies, and enables its

discursive update by providing access.

Integrating both traditions, the interface function of the archive can

be described in two ways, which will further inform the discussion of

digitization later in this paper. On the one hand, archives have to ensure the

physical stability of their inventories, including as well the preservation of

the storage carriers and the availability of the appropriate hardware; on the

other hand, they have to effectively guarantee the intellectual stability of their

content, which circumscribes the establishment of archival order most

commonly presented by the catalogue and the various efforts to keep their

stocks visible and accessible for re-use. By questioning how these tasks are

actually affected by digital technologies in different archives, this paper

shows which ‘supervening social necessities’ trigger their implementation

and what issues add to the ‘suppression of [their] radical potential’.14

Besides

the general description of this process I particularly examine what Régis

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Debray calls ‘the strong viscosity of daily practices’ that tend to slow down

the actual adaptation of media technologies and at least partially reconfigure

their intended ways of use.15

2. Archives and the History of Audiovision

As outlined above, digitization is not solely a technical issue, and

neither are audiovisual media. A brief digression concerning the audiovisual

pre-history of the issues adressed by digitization will thus prepare the ground

for the discussion of the current impacts. To get a grip on the workings of the

audiovisual within a framework of cultural memory it is useful to establish a

perspective that emphasizes ‘the interrelation of technology, organisation

(including economics and politics) and aesthetics of media’, which is called

the ‘audiovisual mediasphere’ by Frank Hartmann.16

Therein the archive

operates as an interface and source of audiovisual reproduction, while the

archive itself is subject to overarching transformations in the reproduction of

the audiovisual mediasphere. Media scholar Siegfried Zielinski describes the

audiovisual mediasphere as part of a larger ‘discourse of cultural industry’

and categorizes its transformations on several stages of transition between

different constellations of the audiovisual.17

According to Zielinski, the

audiovisual apparatus has moved from an anarchic early period through the

constellations of cinema and television to a disposition of advanced

audiovision characterised by networked environments and a high variability

of devices and formats. In the following, this development will be portrayed

along its major technical and economic lines, briefly analysing the functions

of the audiovisual archive against this background, and emphasising the

current challenges of digitization.

Preservation has always been the foremost concern of archivists of

any kind. Looking at the development of preservation throughout audiovisual

history, one gets the picture of an ever-decreasing storage life. While film is

meanwhile considered a rather stable and secure medium with a storage life

of over a hundred years if stored in favourable conditions (despite

unpredictable problems such as chemical decay) the shelf life of magnetic

(video) tape is significantly lower with an estimate of 30 years.18

A particular

instability factor is therefore the lack of reliable experience or long-term

testing with all new formats. This leads to a situation where horror stories

like NASA’s loss of approximately one million data tapes of early space flight

history predominantly shape the perception of electronic storage media.19

After all, what has become clear in the course of format evolution from film

to tape to digital files is that the quest for longer lasting carriers is obviously

in vain. As a consequence, archives are challenged with developing strategies

for copying information instead of preserving carriers – a task that has

become increasingly difficult and costly in the face of ever-growing amounts

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of footage produced. A task that is now, at least potentially, being transferred

to so-called tape libraries, that reproduce unstable carriers automatically.20

In

this sense, digital reproduction can be understood as the essence of the

deficiencies of mechanical production being its very materiality. Yet, while

the footage is indeed turning immaterial in the (non-)shape of bits and bytes,

the material factor certainly prevails when looking at the considerable

financial burden the shift to digital preservation hardware brings about.

With the ongoing replacement of different formats the succession

itself has become a problem of preservation in its own right. While film

standards remained rather constant in their predominant fashions of 16mm

and 35mm, video technology with its significantly faster innovation cycles

saw a varied recursion of the problem. Due to the lack of Quadruplex, Type-

C and Type-B tape machines, archives have experienced increasing problems

in maintaining access to TV-recordings from the 1960s to the 1980s. The

question of reproduction becomes inherently a question of conversion –

especially as the problems of television once again multiplied with digital

production and broadcasting techniques. Decisions for and against different

broadcasting standards (e.g. PAL, NTSC, SECAM) and tape formats (e.g.

DigiBeta, DVCpro) are now coupled with struggles for the right file formats

and standardized High Definition resolution.21

In this sense, the archive

figures not only as an interface but also as a converter – diachronically for

older format generations and synchronically for material from/for countries

with different technical norms or different media platforms. Thereby the

convergence potential of digitization is obviously foiled by the ongoing

differentiation of formats and standards. While consumer demands can

usually be served by a few dominant formats, it remains a strategically

crucial factor for the archives to maintain their ability to convert most of

them, however rare they might be.22

So far the prevailing perspective has primarily focused on the basic

requirements of preserving and distributing high-quality materials necessary

for professional re-use of audiovisual materials. Yet, a look at the

restructuring of audiovisual archiving seems to suggest that the more

profound change lies in the possibilities to access footage stocks enabled by

network technologies. Until the advent of cheap and broadly available tape

technology like VHS, research for stock shots could only be done by going

into the archive, searching the card catalogues and screening the film footage

itself. Tapes then allowed archives to operate in a more agency-like mode:

Requests from producers could be increasingly handled by the archivists

themselves, then providing preview material on low-quality formats like VHS

or DVD later on the required clippings were chosen from. This meant a

noticeable decrease in time and cost that met the demands of an accelerated

pace, especially in television production.23

Against this background, the

online publication of catalogues as searchable databases with integrated

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preview videos, and thus the merging of the steps of accessing an archive’s

data stock and the examination of the material with regard to its feasibility

can be seen as a further concession to the audiovisual industry’s demand for

ready-made footage for just-in-time production. A look at the points of

introduction of new preview technologies in the audiovisual archives reveals

an interesting detail of media history: VHS and other tape systems were

introduced in the heydays of television while databases were only

implemented when the computer was about to become a widely available

medium and the World Wide Web began to reach out for (audio-)visual

content. In this sense, new media continuously provide their own new tools

for accessing stocks of old media and thus ensuring their own supply with

ready-made materials.

The acceleration of production cycles runs parallel to an ongoing

extension and segmentation of the audiovisual market. Twenty-four seven

programming and the increase in television channels has led to a situation in

which the permanent availability of audiovisual products veils a factual

scarcity of images.24

Linked to this, the repetition of entire programmes and

the replication of clips in varying contexts has become characteristic of

today’s audiovisual culture. Besides the higher demand for factual footage by

extended news coverage, documentaries, and magazine programming, the

increase in television channels, and more recently web platforms, has

triggered a significant increase in advertising that heavily relies on stock

footage. Audiovisual archives have subsequently adapted the strategies of

stock photography agencies for selling pre-fabricated stock footage, and, vice

versa, photo agencies such as Getty Images have also extended their scope

from mere photographs to video and film. Online databases thereby foster the

idea of unmediated access to the inventory, first for research via preview

materials and, secondly, augmented with the option to purchase and receive

high-quality materials directly via the Internet.

The following chapters will show that different kinds of footage

require different forms of treatment. When prepared for diverse target

audiences, the materials need different indexing strategies, for instance. And

while advertisment footage, probably more than anything else, is subject to

an aesthetic decline and thus inevitably replaced in an agency’s stock,

historical footage gains its value from its uniqueness and especially its

difference to current aesthetics.25

Eventually the categories of advertisement

and historical footage certainly cannot be treated as rigid, especially as the

context is the decisive factor that defines the material’s status. Yet, for

archives that handle both kinds the distinction as an organisational criterion

holds true, finding its imprint in the structures and the practices within the

archive.

From an overarching perspective, digital technologies thus carry two

major potentials: on one level digitization figures as a strategy of automated

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preservation, while on another level it can be portrayed as the paradigm of

developing new access and distribution tools. In the following section,

different configurations of these potentials and their actual realisation in

professional environments will be outlined.

3. Configurations

The implementation and use of digital technologies is dependent on

several factors that oscillate between the archives’ institutional layouts, their

specific holdings, and their economic potential. Accordingly digitization

strategies are highly differentiated between film and television archives,

public and private archives and also quite simply between smaller and bigger

archives.

Looking at Germany, one of the central institutions and certainly the

largest for audiovisual archiving is the Federal Archives Film Archive

(Bundesarchiv Filmarchiv), one of the biggest film archives worldwide

approximately filing one million reels.26

Its rather defensive stance towards

digitization is primarily expressed by the fact that there is no coherent

database accessible via the Internet, but only singular non-database

catalogues for specific holdings. Despite working with MAVIS, a media asset

management system used by several other national film archives that also

allows online publication of audiovisual material, the adjustment for online

access is not planned, though the general option is vaguely considered.27

The

explanation given is that priority is given to the ongoing synchronization of

different holdings, with respect to their meta data, as the archive still has to

cope with the integration of the German Democratic Republic’s film archive

after German reunification. Furthermore, the archive still suffers from the

database experiments of the 1990s, when several different databases were

introduced for different stocks. This has added to the problems of

synchronizing the available data in the current database, because the

standardized transmission of data sets, for instance via XML, is not feasible

for a number of the older databases, or is generally hindered by incompatible

data sets and description categories.28

After all, the case of the Bundesarchiv

Filmarchiv perfectly illustrates the slow pace of technical innovation when it

comes to adaptation. It is only after several failed experiments with different

databases that a working solution begins to take shape – how long the

restructuring process itself will take is another question.

The reason for the restructuring the Bundesarchiv Filmarchiv along

digital lines being an unpredictable task is not at least to be found in the

institution’s economic shortcomings. The archive does not hold the copyright

for most of its stocks, but only acts as a preserving agent. The distribution of

usage rights owned by the archive is in the meantime transferred to different

distribution companies (Transit Film, Wochenschau GmbH, DEFA Film)

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which have opened their sales catalogues to the public to different degrees.

Though its policies ostensibly promote access to cultural heritage, the actual

political and economic circumstances certainly favour the focus on physical

preservation, which is also the field of expertise where national archives are

unmet in terms of skill and resources.

However, within the framework of its cultural duties the

Bundesarchiv Filmarchiv is by all means involved in overarching projects to

improve access to audiovisual heritage. On a national level this includes,

among others, the online database filmportal.de, which gives an almost

complete account of German film production throughout history. On a

European level, the most recent project is filmarchives-online.eu, combining

meta data provided by different archives from different countries to create

one coherent database. Thus, the Bundesarchiv Filmarchiv combines

databases and the Internet as tools for opening its collections to the outside

world, but only to a limited degree, and mostly in the context of specific

projects. As a consequence, new possibilities for exploitation are not

anticipated beyond the archive’s contribution to public cultural policy in

online environments. It is significant for these cooperative projects that meta

data and materials have to be recreated specifically for each project due to the

lack of a general digitization strategy that would build up a sustainable

infrastructure for the re-use of once digitised materials. Besides the project

filmportal.de, which is rather more a film lexicon than a distribution

catalogue, no constantly available online presentation platform actually

exists, let alone a possibility to gather meta data through models that involve

the archive user in description processes.

There would certainly be an immense educational and informational

surplus value in the consistent hypertextual linkage of archive resources as

Olivier Nyirubugara highlights in the case of Dutch museums.29

However, as

long as it does not add to the crucial processes within an archive’s daily

operations, and thus serves no supervening necessity, it will scarcely be

realized as the example of the Bundesarchiv Filmarchiv suggests. As a side

effect, the skill of the archivists and the superior knowledge of professional

researchers remains a valuable resource while the catalogues remain closed

off.

Within this setting the digitization of footage is dependent on

sporadic demands. The scanning of film reels and their conversion into a high

definition format takes place on request, but in terms of preservation, digital

formats are categorically deemed as not future-proof. For 35mm film

especially the surplus of digitized versions is limited, as at least negatives of

good quality reach a higher resolution than 1920 x 1080 of the current

standard of Full HD.30

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By focusing television archiving as it is done by ITN Source, for

instance,it can be observed that the issue is not about digital archiving itself

not being future-proof. Beginning with the shift from analogue to digital

newsrooms in the late 1990s, digital television production subsequently

triggered digital television archiving. Therefore the accelerated cycles of

actuality production and the vast amounts of footage figured as the

supervening social necessity for new archive technologies. Though video

images are still recorded onto videotape first, it is no longer the prevailing

storage media. After usage for production, video tapes entering the archive

are read into the computer, useful and/or important parts are listed by shot

and indexed, and the clipped footage is stored on data tapes (e.g. SAIT-2) in

so-called automated tape libraries (e.g. Petasite S200). The crucial point here

is that video tapes (like DigiBeta or DVCpro) are hereby no longer stored, but

deleted and re-used for as long as considered feasible, while the image

information is stored on mass storage media that will automatically be

replaced by the storage system whenever showing signs of abrasion.

Regarding the ‘future-proofness’ of digital storage systems, technology has

come a long way. Although archivists are still debating the reliability of

systems and standards, practical necessities have taken the lead towards a

consensus on digital archiving, which in the light of tremendously increased

storage capacities also holds true for audiovisual archiving. However, as

mentioned above, this shift in strategies comes at considerable cost, turning

the opportunity of consistent digital storage and distribution into a question of

financial power. Given this economic issue it is hardly surprising that

specialized smaller archives, or archives with no supervening need for digital

storage in their daily operations observe difficulties in adjusting to digital

audiovisual reproduction systems.

Besides generally speeding up production processes and providing a

steady instantaneous availability of all archived material, the additional

benefit of these digital mass storage systems is the possibility to create

preview materials as a side action while storing material. Thus in the daily

operation of television archives such as ITN Source, the collection and

selection of materials lead not only to an update of the internal database, but

also of the web catalogue. In contrast to analogue environments, where

updating the catalogue does not automatically add to its external

representation and storing material does not automatically produce preview

materials, digital environments can serve to connect very different and, so

far, separated layers of the archive. The most productive connections can be

identified as the link between the internal research databases and the web-

based sales catalogues, and the direct and digitally manifested linkage

between the audiovisual content and its metadata.

However, the availability of mass storage does not automatically

imply the digitization of complete stocks. ITN Source, for instance, manages

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a proclaimed one million hours of film and video footage all together, and

had digitized about 6000 hours by the end of 2007. The latest calculation for

filling the currently disposable storage capacity of 100,000 hours came to the

conclusion that thirteen years of twenty-four seven video importing would be

necessary.31

For the time being this means that digital archiving will be

inevitably accompanied by traditional analogue archiving and thus by the

well-known risk of losing audiovisual stocks through physical decay. In

contrast to the overall digitization of daily news and television production,

the digitization of older materials thus can be seen as a highly selective long-

term process. Accordingly, the question arises what footage gets digitized

and actually processed for re-use. This primarily concerns requested footage

or footage that might be of interest in actual and historical programming; at

the same time, marginal or at least less popular topics are scarcely considered

for digitization. Furthermore, not all digitized materials are displayed in the

web catalogue. Due to legal restrictions – from personality rights to

intellectual property issues – only a ‘cleaned’ cut-out of the digitized stocks

is finally represented on the web. This means that digital archiving, despite

its often presumed potential of granting universal storage and access,

produces similar memory gaps as traditional archiving due to a heterogenic

group of organisational and legal reasons.

Yet, the crucial moment of change for the audiovisual mediasphere

is that these online platforms created by ITN Source and the like form nodes

of advertency in the footage market which is about to be restructured along

several lines. First, a process of consolidation is taking place. Big players

acquire the distribution rights for all kinds of collections to fill and broaden

their own repertoire. This also implies the merging of formerly separated

fields of editorial footage and advertisement stock shots. Second, this process

is taking place on a global scale – the development of marketing platforms on

the web is usually guarded by establishing offices in the major media centres

around the world and the making of strategic alliances with local partners in

different countries to enter national media markets. Third, this leads to a new

pricing system – flat pricing for cut-outs is promoted in opposition to the

traditional per-second-pricing. Thus, similar to other branches of the

(information) economy, an overall trend for rationalization can be observed

that underlies the globalisation of audiovisual memory.

4. Continuities

Interestingly, despite the tendencies of concentration, the system of

audiovisual reproduction shows a remarkably high viscosity regarding certain

structures. Comparably small archives prove their ability to compete and

even increase their revenue regardless of their obvious disadvantage in the

range of their stocks or their technical ability to provide online databases.

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On the one hand, this is due to the stability of distribution structures,

as the example of the Chronos-Media archive in Germany shows: by holding

stocks of forty years’ worth of documentary production and acquiring

additional collections, especially about the history of Berlin, Chronos-Media

has now been working for several decades as a footage provider for German

television. As a niche archive, serving a rather small segment of historical

and magazine programming, Chronos-Media benefits from its traditional

position in the German media system. In the course of the continuing

cooperation, preferably with public documentary programming a certain

amount of the archive’s footage was stored in German television archives.

The production practice of television now demonstrates the tendency that

footage already at hand gets prioritized for new productions. Most notably,

news and magazine programming tend to resort to well-known shots, while

rather the well-funded and investigation-oriented documentary projects try to

find and activate new (old) footage.32

Thus in many cases it is only

previously used footage that becomes re-licensed, leading to an aggregation

of the visual language of historical documentary that culminates in few but

consistently used visual stereotypes.33

From the perspective of the archive

this is definitely not an incentive for converting their stocks into newer

formats on a larger scale. It is rather the concrete demand that leads to an

update in format, which is quite often done by television stations themselves.

This shows again that technical updates, if performed at all, are eventually

influenced by public interest for certain content that can be translated into

revenues or at least attention for the providing institution.

Another strand of continuity that is barely reflected in the respective

workings on cultural memory, is the factual adaptation of new technologies

and the subsequent techniques by people acting in the specific field. As

shown above for the archivists themselves, one might also point at the

television producers. Looking at the practices of re-using archive footage the

question can be asked, whether and to what extent digitized footage and

databases are used. For digitized high-quality footage the situation is quite

simple regarding the aforementioned switch to digital technology in

television production. Since the footage becomes digitised for editing

anyhow, it does not matter whether this is done by the archive, the production

company, or a broadcaster. Yet an exemplary moment of delay concerning

footage distribution arrives with the increasing spread of high definition

programming: though digital delivery of broadcast quality footage is feasible

in times of broadband capacities of several megabits per second, it is not

considered convenient in many cases. For instance, uncompressed HDCAM

footage has data rates up to 880 Mbps, significantly limiting the potential of

standard broadband lines as a distribution infrastructure, at least when

considering larger footage requests.34

Thus clippings from film still usually

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get scanned and are rather conventionally read out on HD tapes that are

eventually delivered via couriers to customers.

Moreover, even online databases and online previews are only

partially accepted by professionals. Since the advent of VHS, a system

became established in which specialized researchers, either freelancing or

employed by archives themselves, act as brokers between the archive content

and the producers.35

For them, online research certainly simplifies their work,

especially for larger projects. In such cases, however, deeper research beyond

digital holdings is rather the rule than the exception since only little portions

of the overall holdings are so far digitized.36

Seen from this perspective,

online access to archive catalogues has only limited scopes as long as

researchers continue to be the pre-selectors for the producers, and as long as

digital holdings still only represent cut-outs of entire archives.

The stable structures of ‘big’ television programming indicate that it

is rather the long tail of advertising agencies that are the primary target of

digital footage marketing. Their immediate demands are served by the ‘flat’

catalogues of commercial stock shots, rather than by the ‘deep’ historical

archive. Unlike historical programming, advertisement programming does

not usually draw on lengthy research procedures, especially when it is about

low quality clips for new media environments, for example the Web or

mobile phone applications. Accordingly, television archives steadily scour

their daily input for footage potentially meeting advertising standards to be

integrated in their web catalogues. This includes iconic pictures and

recognizable patterns presented in current video aesthetics, de-contextualized

at best and thus re-usable in arbitrary contexts. Yet, this is not an entirely new

concept: this process can actually be seen as an adoption of a strategy

developed by photography agencies as early as the 1930s.37

While television

and new media markets, and thus audiovisual advertisement, expanded from

the 1970s onwards, audiovisual reproduction lacked the appropriate

infrastructure for such agency-like business models. Now the Internet is

being embraced as the desired infrastructure, if only by the bigger

commercial players.

5. Conclusion

As we can see, digitization of audiovisual heritage is overall a far

cry from being realized. Most materials remain on their ‘original’ carriers,

waiting for their sporadic conversion on demand. Though television archives

approach the task of digitizing larger parts of their holdings, this only

represents a rather small proportion of audiovisual heritage all together for

the time being. Especially since distribution structures based on the

legislation of intellectual property remain rather stable, the digital rebuilding

of the archive as such can be said to have only a minor influence on the

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constitution of cultural memory and its cycles of actualisation. While low-

quality materials can be freely accessed, though commonly stamped with

watermarks, the access to high-quality footage for further media production

stays bound to the traditional economics of the audiovisual. What can be

observed is the trend that formerly separated audiovisual fields such as

advertising and documentary programming are merging, at least when

considering the structures of footage supply. In a sense, the ‘depth’ of the

archives’ databases is combined with flat compilation catalogues in the

tradition of stock photography agencies. As a result, digitization can be

clearly defined as an economically driven revolution enabling the archives to

meet an increasing portion of the demands of the audiovisual industry more

efficiently, rather than to increase factual public access.

Notes

1 F Hartmann, Mediologie. Ansätze einer Medientheorie der

Kulturwissenschaften, Facultas, Vienna, 2003, p. 150. Translation by Thomas

Nachreiner; original quote in German: ‘Digitalkultur heißt derzeit

offensichtlich nicht, mit neuen Technologien neue Kulturen zu synthetisieren,

sondern lediglich, die traditionellen Speicher des Wissens in digitale

Techniken zu übersetzen.’ 2 J Derrida, Mal d’archive. Une impressionne freudienne, Éditions Galilée,

Paris, 1995, p. 22. 3 W Ernst, Das Rumoren der Archive, Merve, Berlin, 2002, p. 13.

4 P Voss and M Werner, ‘Toward a poetics of the archive: Introduction’, in

Studies in Literary Imagination, volume 32, number 1 (Spring 1999), pp. ii. 5 A Assmann, ‘Das Archiv und die neuen Medien des kulturellen

Gedächtnisses’ in G Stanitzek and W Vosskamp (eds), Schnittstelle. Medien

und kulturelle Kommunikation, DuMont, Cologne, 2001, pp. 268-270. 6 A Assmann, ‘Zur Mediengeschichte des kulturellen Gedächtnisses’ in A

Erll and A Nünning (ed), Medien des kollektiven Gedächtnisses.

Konstruktivität – Historizität – Kulturspezifität, De Gruyter, Berlin 2004, p.

50. 7 B Drechsel, Politik im Bild. Wie politische Bilder entstehen und wie digitale

Bildarchive arbeiten, Campus Verlag, Frankfurt and New York, 2005, p. 97. 7 op. cit. Assmann 2004, p.55.

8 C Saracco, Politique des archives audiovisuelles, Bauhaus University,

Weimar, 2002, p. 179. 9 A Assmann, Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen

Gedächtnisses, Beck, Munich, 1999, p. 20.

Future-proof? How Audiovisual Archives Adopt Digital Technologies

______________________________________________________________

14

10

Also in this issue: M Burkhardt, ‘Is There a Way Back or Can the Internet

Remember ist Own History?’ 11

M Foucault, Archäologie des Wissens, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a. M., 1986, p.

188. Translation by Thomas Nachreiner; original quote in German: ‘System

der Formation und Transformation der Aussagen’. 12

W Ernst, ‘Medien@archäologie (Provokation der Mediengeschichte)’ in

Schnittstelle: Medien und Kulturelle Kommunikation, G Stanitzek and V

Wilhelm (eds), DuMont, Cologne, 2001, pp. 250-67. 13

B Winston, Media Technology and Society. A History: From the Telegraph

to the Internet, Routledge, London 1998, pp. 14. 14

Debray, R., ‘Für eine Mediologie’ in C Pias et al. (eds), Kursbuch

Medienkultur. Die maßgeblichen Theorien von Brecht bis Baudrillard, DVA,

Stuttgart, 1999, p. 72. Translation by Thomas Nachreiner; original quote in

German: ‘die starke Viskosität der täglichen Praktiken’. 15

Hartmann, Mediologie, p. 111. Translation by Thomas Nachreiner; original

quote in German: ‘den Zusammenhang von Technik, Organisation

(einschließlich Ökonomie und Politik) und Ästhetik der Medien’. 16

S Zielinski, Audiovisionen. Kino und Fernsehen als Zwischenspiele in der

Geschichte, Rowohlt, Reinbek, 1989, p. 13. 17

ibid. p. 14. 18

M Warnke, ‘Digitale Archive’ in H Pompe and L Scholz (eds),

Archivprozesse: Kommunikation der Aufbewahrung, DuMont, Cologne,

2002, p. 274. 19

ibid. 20

D Schüller, ‘Jenseits von Petabyte - zum weltweiten Speicherbedarf für

Audio- und Videoträger’, in Bericht der 18. Tonmeistertagung Karlsruhe

1994, Saur-Verlag, Munich, 1995, p. 859. 21

T Nachreiner, Interview with Dave Price, Technical Director ITN Source,

29th

May 2007. 22

ibid. 23

T Nachreiner, Interview with Ellen Shapiro, Accountant Executive

Broadcast Indies, ITN Source, 29th

May 2007. 24

M Bruhn, Bildwirtschaft. Verwaltung und Verwertung der Sichtbarkeit,

VDG, Weimar, 2003, p. 53. 25

M Steinle, ‘Das Archivbild. Archivbilder als Palimpseste zwischen

Monument und Dokument im audiovisuellen Gemischtwarenladen’ in

Medienwissenschaft, number 3 (2005), p. 296. 26

F Beyer, Filmarchive in Deutschland. Zugang und Bestandsnutzung, Vdm

Dr. Müller, Saarbrücken, 2006, p. 37. 27

T Nachreiner, Interview with Martina Werth-Mühl, Department Head

Bundesarchiv Filmarchiv, 23rd

March 2007.

Thomas Nachreiner

______________________________________________________________

15

28

ibid. 29

Also in this issue: O Nyirubugara, ‘Clickable memories: Hyperlinking and

memory contextualization’ 30

T Nachreiner, Interview with Martina Werth-Mühl, Department Head

Bundesarchiv Filmarchiv, 23rd

March 2007. 31

T Nachreiner, Interview with Karena Smith, Development Manager ITN

Source, 29 th

May 2007. 32

T Nachreiner, Interview with Konstantin von zur Mühlen, Managing

Director Chronos-Media, 23 rd

March 2007. 33

W Holly, ‘Ich bin ein Berliner und andere mediale Geschichtsklischees’ in

U Schmitz et al. (eds), Wissen und neue Medien. Bilder und Zeichen von 800

bis 2000, Erich Schmidt, Berlin, 2003, pp. 227-230. 34

The transfer of 20 minutes of HDCAM via the Internet – considering the

availability of 50 Mbps promised by your provider – would take about 6

hours and would imply a certain uncertainty whether the files are complete

and uncorrupted. 35

T Nachreiner, Interview with Ellen Shapiro, Accountant Executive

Broadcast Indies, ITN Source, 29th

May 2007. 36

V Massignon, La Recherche d’Images. Méthodes, sources et droits,

DeBoeck, Bruxelles, 2002, p. 10. 37

op. cit. Bruhn, p. 55.

Bibliography Assmann, A., ‘Zur Mediengeschichte des kulturellen Gedächtnisses’. A Erll

and A Nünning (eds), Medien des kollektiven Gedächtnisses. Konstruktivität

– Historizität – Kulturspezifität. De Gruyter, Berlin 2004, pp. 45-60.

–––‚ ‘Das Archiv und die neuen Medien des kulturellen Gedächtnisses’. G

Stanitzek and W Vosskamp (eds), Schnittstelle. Medien und kulturelle

Kommunikation. DuMont, Cologne, 2001, pp. 268-281.

–––, Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen

Gedächtnisses. Beck, Munich, 1999.

Beyer, F., Filmarchive in Deutschland. Zugang und Bestandsnutzung. Vdm

Dr. Müller, Saarbrücken, 2006.

Bruhn, M., Bildwirtschaft. Verwaltung und Verwertung der Sichtbarkeit.

VDG, Weimar, 2003.

Future-proof? How Audiovisual Archives Adopt Digital Technologies

______________________________________________________________

16

Debray, R., ‘Für eine Mediologie’. C Pias et al. (eds), Kursbuch

Medienkultur. Die maßgeblichen Theorien von Brecht bis Baudrillard. DVA,

Stuttgart, 1999, pp. 67-75.

Derrida, J., Mal d’archive. Une impressionne freudienne. Éditions Galilée,

Paris, 1995.

Drechsel, B., Politik im Bild. Wie politische Bilder entstehen und wie digitale

Bildarchive arbeiten. Campus Verlag, Frankfurt and New York, 2005.

Ernst, W., Das Rumoren der Archive. Merve, Berlin, 2002.

Ernst, W., ‘Medien@archäologie (Provokation der Mediengeschichte)’. G

Stanitzek and V Wilhelm (eds.), Schnittstelle: Medien und Kulturelle

Kommunikation. DuMont, Cologne, 2001, pp. 250-67.

Foucault, M., Archäologie des Wissens. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a. M., 1986.

Holly, W., ‘Ich bin ein Berliner und andere mediale Geschichtsklischees.

Multimodale Stereotypisierungen historischer Objekte in einem

Fernsehjahrhundertrückblick’. U Schmitz et al. (eds), Wissen und neue

Medien. Bilder und Zeichen von 800 bis 2000. Erich Schmidt, Berlin, 2003,

pp. 215-240.

Massignon, V., La Recherche d’Images. Méthodes, sources et droits.

DeBoeck, Bruxelles, 2002.

Nachreiner, T., Interview with Dave Price, Technical Director ITN Source,

29th

May 2007.

–––‚ Interview with Ellen Shapiro, Accountant Executive Broadcast Indies,

ITN Source, 29th

May 2007.

–––‚ Interview with Karena Smith, Development Manager ITN Source, 29 th

May 2007.

–––‚ Interview with Konstantin von zur Mühlen, Managing Director

Chronos-Media, 23 rd

March 2007.

Thomas Nachreiner

______________________________________________________________

17

–––‚ Interview with Martina Werth-Mühl, Department Head Bundesarchiv

Filmarchiv, 23rd

March 2007.

Saracco, C., Politique des archives audiovisuelles. Dissertation Bauhaus

University, Weimar, 2002.

Schüller, D., ‘Jenseits von Petabyte - zum weltweiten Speicherbedarf für

Audio- und Videoträger’. Bericht der 18. Tonmeistertagung Karlsruhe 1994.

Saur-Verlag, Munich, 1995, pp. 857-861.

Steinle, M., ‘Das Archivbild. Archivbilder als Palimpseste zwischen

Monument und Dokument im audiovisuellen Gemischtwarenladen’.

Medienwissenschaft, no. 3 (2005), pp. 295-309.

Voss, P. and Werner, M., ‘Toward a poetics of the archive: Introduction’.

Studies in Literary Imagination, vol. 32, number 1 (Spring 1999), pp. ii–viii.

Warnke, M., ‘Digitale Archive’. H Pompe and L Scholz (eds),

Archivprozesse: Kommunikation der Aufbewahrung. DuMont, Cologne,

2002, pp. 269-281.

Winston, B., Media Technology and Society. A History: From the Telegraph

to the Internet. Routledge, London 1998.

Zielinski, S., Audiovisionen. Kino und Fernsehen als Zwischenspiele in der

Geschichte. Rowohlt, Reinbek, 1989.

Thomas Nachreiner is a Research Assistant and a Lecturer at the University

of Erlangen-Nuremberg. While interested in the interconnection of history

and media, his research is currently devoted to the remediation of historical

representations on the Web.