Instantiations: Formatted Data and Narrative

 [1938 Kodachrome of NYC + Jones Beach] 1999:0078:0001, George Eastman House
A drive by the New York World's Fair site under construction

Students at the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation, George Eastman House, are trained in film handling and inspection. What information gathered during film inspection will we pass on to researchers in our catalog records, and what do researchers want to know? First, a reminder about the PBCore structure. Each reel has one Intellectual Content record, a set of elements describing what the reel is about, independent of its physical or digital existence. Each reel also has one or more Instantiation records, consisting of technical metadata describing the asset’s physical attributes (format, condition, location).

As skilled film handlers, the Selznick School students identified and captured information that tells us not only its present condition, but about its creation: often there are date codes indicating what year the film stock was created, and sometimes camera codes that reveal the type of camera used. Splices can tell how the creator edited the film, and whether a reel may come from one or more sources. Assessing condition, in particular shrinkage or vinegar syndrome, guides the custodians as to care of the artifact. The Instantiation record for the original material is important from a conservation point of view, and potentially holds information of interest to researchers, for example, was the reel shot on 8 mm. or 16 mm. film?

[1938 Kodachrome of NYC + Jones Beach] 1999:0078:0001
George Eastman House

Some Instantiation information is easily captured in structured fields as we are presently doing using PBCore’s formatPhysical element. Use of picklists and formatted elements ensures consistency in the data collected. However, our discussion indicates there may be a place for a more complex Instantiation narrative; as one student points out, “Some things like the film being upside down and our not being able to determine if that was intentional.”
NHF Media Cataloger Brian Graney shared film inspection notes recorded by Bob Brodsky while transferring a film from the Charles Gilbert Collection, “not simply documenting the number and types of splices. A speculative story about the process based on the evidence in the film.” Graney posits that such narrative “may not be possible or useful in every case so it may be that two different types of technical description could exist side by side--the basic description, element by element--where that’s sufficient to record. That supplemented by a narrative statement where something becomes clear."

The students had strong arguments for both formatted metadata and for narrative about the material condition:

...there can be some uniform information. Like boxes or bullets. Then there can be some space for small narrative. So the inspector is not being redundant, so if you have shrinkage space you are not repeating information in the narrative, but if you want to tell something else you have space.

We discussed how much of the PBCore Instantiation data should be presented directly to the researcher. While one student felt an unprepared researcher would find this information "chaos," another felt that the physical description was important to understanding the nature of the record, what it is, how it was made, and what kind of care original film requires:

Why should that be hidden from the users? Its part of the story of the film....And also it’s part of educating the users about what the film is and the fact that it has splices and they can come apart. And it’s old and it changes color and all this kind of thing. For this project I think the narrative works.1939 NY World's Fair--Jeanne at Y camp--home movies] T200.1.442WF39
Queens Museum of

The consensus from the Selznick School discussion may be that a structured Instantiation record gathers baseline technical information, supplemented by a narrative in the Annotation element expanding on the inspectors’ findings. For analog assets such as camera original amateur films, careful and knowledgeable inspection of the film and its box or can gathers valuable information left behind once a digital copy is made.