In "The VHS Legacy Can Be Saved, But Will It?" Peter Monaghan discusses the challenges of preserving VHS tapes. As a medium, they are physically hard to preserve, and working VHS machines are equally hard to find. Besides the physical, archivists have to face myriad copyright issues, and ensure anything they convert from VHS to another format is completely inaccessible to buy at a reasonable price in any other format. Once they do the copyright research and decide they can copy a tape, a good copy requires the proper equipment and software—but more importantly, time, as someone has to watch the tape and look for problems while it is being converted. In short, it seems like a lot of effort and cost for little reward.
I find myself wondering how many people use VHS audio-visual collections anyway. I once wrote a paper using US Army training and public relations film as my main primary sources; however, that was from digitized film reels held in the public domain by the US National Archives. I also took a Latin America through film class, but all the films we used were already on DVD. However, I feel like I am more an exception than the norm, and while I appreciated being able to use those resources, I imagine it is hard for archivists to justify the cost and time required to convert or preserve VHS tapes when the majority of users probably won’t use them. Perhaps it would be better for a library or archive specializing in film to collect and copy tapes from smaller archives that don’t have the resources or desire to preserve them. In any case, this article brings up the same issue of limited resources I keep noticing over and over again. It’s regrettable archivists have to decide beetween what to save and what to discard
0 Comments
David Bearman argues in “Access and Use” (chapter 4 of Archival Methods) that archives should put more focus on their users. He argues that archives don’t usually prioritize their users when making decisions ranging from appraisal to ease of access. He argues that archives have “preferred” users, usually “serious scholars,” and make little effort to increase their user base by conducting outreach and development.
I have little trouble accepting Bearman’s claim that geneologists and amateur historians are the bulk of most archives’ user base, and that they are often not an archives’ preferred user. Perhaps archives should try harder to cultivate better relationships with these users, and gain them as devoted supporters. I found Bearman’s argument that archives should try to insert themselves more fully into their institutions very compelling. If they became central to daily operations in the way he suggests they certainly would gain more power and resourcing. However, I’m not sure how that would best be accomplished, and I don’t think he provides enough examples of how to do that. Given that Bearman’s work is a call to action to archives to change their practices, and was written in 1989, I wonder how much impact it has made. Certainly the shortage of time and resources he describes at the beginning still remains an issue, but from an outsider’s perspective, it seems like many of his suggestions have been only minimally adopted. If this is true, I am curious as to why: have other authors repudiated his suggestions? Or are there simply not enough resources? One of our readings for Archives and Manuscripts was “The Metadata Is the Interface” by Jennifer Schaffner. Schaffner argues that studies and research done on how scholars use archives suggest archivists need to modify their practices to fit the internet era. She suggests, using the research, that most modern users don’t discover archives and their materials through traditional methods such as finding aids, but rather through internet searches on platforms such as google. Rather than focusing on building catalogues, finding aids, and writing elaborate descriptions, Schaffner proposes archivists instead focus on using metadata to make their materials more discoverable to users. She notes that the relationship between archivist and scholars is changing from archivists directly guiding researchers to relevant sources to archivists making their archives easier to discover.
Schaffner focuses on what the research says and makes recommendations based on the results, but leave me wondering: why have scholars changed their research patterns so much? Certainly the rise of search engines and instant information has made an impact, but it doesn’t seem like that alone would be enough to change research methods so quickly and drastically. It’s possible history education has changed along with technology, and there is much less emphasis now on teaching undergrad history majors the hard skills of how to discover and use archives. Without that emphasis, they turn towards the fastest, easiest method they know—a search engine. The article also reminded me of a usability test I took part in for a web archives. Many of the things Schaffner describes from the studies were very similar to what I did—for example, starting off immediately with a keyword search in the website’s search bar. As I got to know the system, I did find the subject indexes and other features useful, but I imagine most researchers under time pressure would leave the site before fully understanding those features. |