Instantiations: Formatted Data and Narrative 8:35 AM

 [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.

George Eastman House, NHF, Queens Museum of Art Convene 8:09 AM

Students from the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation, George Eastman House, joined project staff and consultants in a PBCore cataloging training March 28-30 in Rochester, NY, describing film reels from George Eastman House and Queens Museum of Art.

Photo by Barbara Puorro Galasso, George Eastman House.

We put it in gear Monday morning as Louise Weinberg, Queens Museum of Art Curator, depicted the physically ephemeral yet provocatively persistent New York World's Fair, 1939-1940. Her newest exhibition at QMA opens on April 10, Future Perfect: Re-Constructing the 1939 New York World's Fair, inspired by blueprints signed by President of the NWYF Corporation, Grover Whalen. The Fair was built in Queens, NY, on territory that was once a wetland, then an apocalyptic ash dump before the Fair was built...to be dismantled when the visitors left. "There are many, many things that were introduced at the Fair. World's Fairs are a way to bring together new ideas, new technologies and introduce them."

Louise is second from the right, next to Jack Brighton. Jack introduced the students to the PBCore metadata standard, beginning with an intro to Dublin Core, the standard on which PBCore was built. Fundamental PBCore concepts are the ASSET, which is the media item's "Platonic form," and its INSTANTIATIONS, which are the physical or digital instances of the asset. PBCore 2.0 has just been released and offers many improvements based on user-community input. See http://pbcore.org/ and http://pbcoreresources.org/

Brian Graney, Media Cataloger, demonstrated the cataloging system CollectiveAccess, explaining the database structure: Entity records (access points for names of creators, donors, people appearing, and other contributors), Intellectual Content (PBCore asset records) and Instantiation records. We discussed Subject and Genre/Form terms and the construction of Titles for amateur films. Students are the initial users of our newly created cataloging manual for cataloging in CollectiveAccess with DACS and PBCore.

The Selznick School class, having spent the academic year learning and practicing film preservation theory and practice, moved to Web-based cataloging of Queens Museum of Art and GEH film reels on Tuesday, describing intellectual content and physical condition, harmonizing the GEH film inspection sheet information with CollectiveAccess database fields. Working in teams of two at computer terminals they consulted reference books and online authorities, engaging in discussion with Louise, Jack, Brian and Karan.

Clara Sanchez-Dehesa, Masha Sharafutdinova, Sung-Eun Shin, Zuzana Zabkova, Nikki Shayer, Marissa Haddock in teams creating entity, intellectual content and instantiation records using the online system. More work stations are in use across the room.

In the next post we will look at some images captured during film handling: students reviewed QMA and GEH film reels, captured individual frames of interest, and when condition allowed made video access copies.

Jeff Stoiber, Selznick School Administrator, Jared Case, Senior Cataloger, and Anthony L'Abbate, Preservation Officer (super NYWF buff) participated throughout the three-day workshop and provided extraordinary hospitality.

Cyrus Pinkham Collection draws scholarly attention 7:54 AM

Last summer (August 2010), our first William S. O'Farrell Fellow Caitlin McGrath came to the archives in Bucksport to research NHF's holdings of amateur films shot at the New York World's Fair. During her exploratory phase she commented to me that a reel shot by Cyrus Pinkham stood out from the group as a high quality film, and that it exemplified the concept of looking at the individual's experience at the fair through the filmmaker's lens. Well, I was thrilled to hear Caitlin's enthusiasm for Pinkham's work as I have been excited about all of the material in that collection since it came in as a technical services transfer job in 2009. So, I suggested that she take a look at the rest of that collection, and she was immediately taken by it.

Two weeks ago, on March 11th, we screened a compilation of materials from the Cyrus Pinkham Collection at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in New Orleans to a small group of scholars and researchers. I introduced the screening and Caitlin spoke over the silent films, narrating about the people, places and history of the filmmaker that she had learned about from talking with the donor. The screening was very well received, and noted for Pinkham's sophisticated use of industry filming and editing techniques and high quality cinematography skills.

The following day Caitlin chaired a panel called "Alternative Film Histories: Hollywood and the Amateur Revisited," in which she presented a paper analyzing Pinkham's Collection, and specifically his short film Be Beautiful (ca. 1938). Her interpretation of the film included an in depth analysis of the techniques used in creating the films and their potential for exposing possible relationships between amateur filmmakers and industrial filmmaking. She also explored the sociological revelations that can be possible when background information is available for amateur films.

The Cyrus Pinkham Collection is slated for cataloging this year as part of the "Moving Images 1938-1939: Amateur Filmmakers Record The New York World's Fair and Its Period" project. We are also seeking preservation funding to create new 16mm film negatives and prints for 2 reels from the collection. For more information about the Cyrus Pinkham Collection please contact us! (nhf@oldfilm.org)

Happy Spring! Gemma

MPLP Thoughts 8:04 PM

My name is Aimee Dus, and I am interning at Northeast Historic Film while finishing up my degree at Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science. I’m excited to be working with film for the first time, and I’m interested in seeing how topics from my coursework on paper based archives relate to film. For example, can, and should, "More Product, Less Process" techniques apply to collections of film and other media? Discussion of MPLP* started with the necessity of dealing with backlogs of huge modern manuscript collections. MPLP guidelines typically discourage processing at the item level, but this practice may not be desirable for film collections. A film reel is not really analogous to an individual document in a set of records, and vital information is not discoverable when individual reels are not described. Another option then, is to focus on making description of each reel more efficient. A cataloger could, for example, abandon shot by shot description of a reel, and instead compose a short summary of the reel's overall content and theme.

Another area where streamlined processing techniques could be applied to film collections is using the accessioning process to complete basic descriptive work. Christine Weideman, in her article “Accessioning as Processing,” discusses practices she established at Yale to alleviate a processing backlog. Having established minimum level descriptive standards for the Yale repository, staff now complete basic finding aids for all collections on accession. A critical step in this process is engaging donors at the beginning of the process so they are aware of limited processing and can give insight into the materials. Weideman even sometimes enlists donors to help with writing series level description. Involving interested donors in the initial processing of a collection could be especially useful for amateur film archives since so many of the films are home movies that donors know well through years of viewing. While these steps do complicate the accessioning process and may not work for every institution, taking advantage of donor knowledge could prevent a collection from entering a processing backlog and make its content immediately available for researchers.

* “More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archival Processing” by Mark A. Greene and Dennis Meissner, 2005.