human metadata

Today in archiving school we talked about archives that are run by crazy collector types (there are no other kinds of collector types. Just kidding. Sorta).

The thing is, collectors collect because they are passionate (dit “crazy about”) the things they are collecting. This means that they amass not only a vast amount of physical material, but also exabytes worth of information about the material: they are usually going to be experts, through and through, in the field in which they are collecting, or at least experts about their collection. So like, they know lots about, say, films of a certain genre. And also things like, oh, what’s in the collection, why each item they have is important, what each item contains, where the item is, where the item came from, what the item is worth.

Also, many collectors tend to be protective of their collections, because they are valuable, if only in the eyes of their collector. This makes collectors kind of paranoid, that someone might want to take away their collection, or to steal valuable items from the collection. Or harm the collection in some way. They might feel similarly about the knowledge they have of their collection: if someone else knows about it, they might be in a position to take it away, right?

So. Collectors know a lot of stuff. But not all collectors are trained in *managing* these materials in any rational way. Why bother cataloging, when *they know* everything already? So their knowledge will end up being strictly proprietary; and even if the collector is okay about sharing info (many looooove talking about their stuff to others — bore-them-to-tears kind of love), it’s likely that he/she is still going to be the only person who has all the information there is to know, just because they’re the closest to the collection, and they might not have time to be cataloging or otherwise purging all the important metadata from their brains. Also, nobody else cares as much as them to find all this out, or so they may think.

So what happens when this person dies? Is all the knowledge going to go with them? Mightn’t this be somewhat detrimental with regard to what’s left?

Filed under: mias

field trip #5 (or something)

Our program went on a tour at Paramount Studios. This wasn’t the ordinary tourist’s tour, though. We instead got to take a peek at the vaults, the many, many vaults containing many, many elements of many, many films. And imagine our astonishment at learning that there’s a whole ‘nother facility in Pennsylvania, half a mile underground, storing many, many, many more elements (usually copies of what’s here in LA) as backup. These are actual bits of film and tape. It must be unbelievably huge. Take that, Google!

Speaking of which, apparently, since everythign is produced digitally these days, elements of films made today are usually kept digital, and rarely transferred to film for archival purposes (because of cost). It seems kind of shortsighted of them, if I heard correctly, not to have devised some sort of permanent, or at least reliable/archive-quality backup system for these (although you can’t really blame anyone when the task itself is so daunting). While you can physically unroll and hold to the light to see what’s on a piece of film, digital information is much harder to search and retrieve. Then there’s the problem of media, and obsolescence, and all that good stuff. And there’s so much information on a moving image that the sheer quantity of data to consider is sort of mind-boggling. And since film is still the most permanent medium we have, the issue of taking care of what’s left is still an important one.

Even the whole process of cataloging all these bits of film, all the information they have to enter into databases – it’s crazy. And it reminds me of the records room at the law firm I temp’d for, and how they also had the sisyphean task of managing their own input and output of information stored in legal records.

Information is how life moves, these days, and it’s hard not to think of managing it all as an exercise in futility. Which is why you have to stay narrow-minded, and take it one bit at a time. (Which also means lots of jobs for people in this business =D)

Filed under: mias