My final project

I’d love to hear feedback from you guys on this. Something I might (would like to) take forward. If you want to keep in touch as I go off to Pratt next semester, you can follow me on Twitter (@marleewalters) or follow my blog (it’s mostly classic movie nerd stuff, but occasionally I post what I’ve been up to) picturespoilers.wordpress.com. Thanks all!

A Proposal for Digitization of the MoMA Film Stills Archive

Abstract

The Museum of Modern Art’s Film Stills Archive, a collection of over four million images from the Golden Age of Hollywood, was moved and currently resides in cold storage at the Celeste Bartos Film Preservation Center in Hamlin, Pennsylvania. These images are not accessible. This proposal puts forth a digitization project, culminating in a fully digitized collection with features for online exhibitions, expert-curated tags, personal collections, social sharing, and links to outside communities interested in film history. The goal of digitizing the Film Stills Archive (FSA) would be to provide access to the existing audience of the collection, as well as draw in new audiences.

I.

In 2002, the world’s largest collection of film stills was moved from its home in the basement of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City to a film preservation center in Hamlin, PA. They were stored in a hallway.

In 2013, the collection still resides with its nitrate film and film negative kin in climate-controlled vaults – inaccessible.

“MoMA’s Film Stills Archive (F.S.A.), for one, provided an important service to the film community… ‘For fifteen dollars you would get a custom still with no licensing fees and all rights granted.’”

“The relocation of the film stills archive of the Museum of Modern Art to Pennsylvania (news article, Jan. 12) is a loss of incalculable importance to those who take films seriously.”

“Access is the final but essential stage in the process [of preservation].”

Digital archives can provide access to information, such as a collection of images, from anywhere in the world with an Internet connection.

II.

While for physical storage, the Celeste Bartos Film Preservation Center in Hamlin, PA may be the right choice for the MoMA film stills archive (FSA) because it is climate-controlled and also home to MoMA’s considerable film collection, for access another solution is needed. As Roger Ebert, Martin Scorsese, and other film notables pointed out when the FSA was moved to “dead storage,” the collection is extremely valuable to film historians, journalists, and filmmakers. Granting access to this community once again may not be worth the price of a digitization effort, but expanding the collection’s audience and engaging new users is worth it to continue the work of preserving the collection. Digital is not a preservation medium, but access can be a part of the preservation whole. Digital archivists and conservationists are aware of the shelf-life of digital technology and for analog works that are digitized, physical storage is still necessary. Digital, can however, offer new access paths and open up new audiences, in a way analog cannot. The goal of the suggested digitization of this collection is to engage the existing audience of film historians, journalists, filmmakers, and amateur bloggers on a new level, drawing in their followers, as well as interesting general MoMA audiences in a unique collection.

III.

Digitized museum collections allow for users to interact with the collection in a “hands-on” way the physical museum environment cannot provide.

An essential feature of digital archives is searchability: the ubiquitous search box. One field scanned for search terms is “tags” or “categories,” often assigned to the item by a curator. “We should be exploring new ways to open up archival description… We need descriptive architectures that allow our users to speak to and in them.” Opening up, as Duff and Verne suggest, the tagging of items, allows for new and often previously unheard voices to contribute to an archive. Involvement by users can spark interest in a collection. However, the ideal “opening” of archival description is not, as some digital archivists misconstrue, for unregulated crowd-sourcing of tags. Too many tags and no standardized categories makes for chaos and reduces searchability. Curating who writes tags and imposing some standards for vocabulary and categories allows for both searchability (search terms entered by users will be more likely to match terms items are actually tagged with) and involvement of users. Sherratt refers to this balance of user involvement and control as “cooperative utility.”

User involvement is a key feature of digital archives, particularly in the case of the FSA. The previous audience of the collection was a small, but dedicated, group of film historians, journalists, filmmakers, and amateur classic movie aficionados. Turner Classic Movies, the classic movie channel, recently launched an app called “Watch TCM.” The app’s primary functions are to provide a live-feed of the broadcast on a cable subscriber’s mobile device or computer and a limited library of movies to watch on-demand. However, another feature on the mobile app is an index of classic movie blogs. The classic movie blogging community is a loyal one, heavily involved on Twitter, and engaged with each other. TCM has its own blog, Movie Morlocks, with contributions from film scholars, but by linking to and acknowledging the contributions of amateur bloggers, they celebrated their existing community and planted the seeds to reach more communities. A blogger included on the app would be more likely to write about the app on his or her blog, alerting his or her blog’s followers to the app, bringing in more viewers to TCM.

Another example of user involvement that has met with less success, but has been formally studied, is user collections. Marty studied users who created personal digital collections on six different museum websites and found that “the majority of respondents felt strongly that museums should offer personal digital collections on their websites, with 79.9% agreeing or strongly agreeing with this statement.” However, users “were generally not interested in editing, annotating, or sharing their collections with others” and often did not return to their collections after creating them. The two routes the museums studied took were either to develop the personal digital collection into a specific tool, such as The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s Education Online tool, aimed at educators and students, or instead providing linking capabilities to social media sites such as Facebook or Pinterest. Marty’s findings are not conclusive, or applicable to all circumstances, and user collections in different museums and contexts may be met with different responses. The previously mentioned communities already interested in the FSA may be more interested in sharing and annotating personal digital collections than the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s audience. Featuring particular “expert” collections (or those of prominent bloggers), alongside links to outside blogs can also promote involvement with user collections in this case.

In addition to user-curated collections and featured expert-curated collections, digital archives of museum holdings also offer the opportunity for online-only exhibitions. As Fletcher and Yumibe note, one of the most important purposes of a digital archive is to “shap[e] the pathways that lead to the production of knowledge.” Exhibitions can offer new views or new pathways into the material on display. By making a display digital, it can reach more people, and its format is not limited by museum standards and space. Museums have previously experimented with interactive physical exhibits, but usually in the context of a children’s museum or a science exhibit. Art has not traditionally been interacted with and able to be changed or experienced in the same way. Digital exhibitions can offer manipulation of once fixed pieces of art. Like user collections, they offer involvement, which can “help us see resources in different ways — we can find new patterns, new problems, new questions.” Sherratt’s project with the Mosman public library in Australia is an example of an online exhibition that allows users to participate by allowing linking (copying and pasting of URLs) between National Archives records, the Australian War Memorial, and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Previously these were separate collections, and once Sherratt built a tool to search across the databases, users created the linkages, on the Mosman exhibition page. Creating new linkages between images through reordering, reorganizing and reconnecting based on user preferences changes an exhibition created by a curator, but it also offers alternative knowledge, expanded beyond the knowledge of a single curator.

Digital provides a unique user experiences that promotes involvement through sourced tagging, sharing, user collections, and online-only exhibitions.

IV.

Digital should not be mistaken for a panacea for every collection or every institution. As previously noted, digital is not a preservation medium alone for analog works and providing access to digitized materials presents obstacles for consideration in mounting a project of this nature.

The cost of labor involved in digitization is an often overlooked obstacle. Physical images must be scanned into a computer and metadata must be entered. Especially in the case of the FSA, scanned images must be checked for quality and possibly corrected or edited. Besides the time this labor requires, it does also cost. Tools, software and hardware, and employees’ time require funding.

Once a collection is digitized it cannot be forgotten either. Maintenance is required for digital collections, just as it is for physical collections. The average lifespan of a hard drive is three to five years, and new formats are developed approximately every eighteen months. Ensuring that when new software comes out that digitized file types can still be read and accessed requires time and continued funding.

This long-term budgeting is often overlooked when institutions fundraise for a digitization project; start-up capital and, as the National Endowment for the Humanities calls it, “implementation” costs are both needed. To that end, the NEH offers three different grants for digitization, depending on the stage of the project (Start-Up, Implementation, and Challenge).

Another pitfall of digitization can be protecting copyrighted images. The Whitney, on their Rights & Reproductions page, limits copying of images to “non-commercial, educational, and personal use,” which acknowledges that users may wish to save an image for use on a personal computer or to share with a class, but protects the sale and distribution copyright of the images of the works of art. The Whitney and MoMA both provide licensing agencies’ contact information to allow for reproduction authorization.

The costs of digitization should not be a deterrent to a project, but rather should be noted and planned for.

V.

Features for user engagement such as user collections, sharing, tagging, and linking are important for creating an archive audiences will use, but the design of the interface is also important. Without dictating a software or specific design, a look at different digital archives created to increase access will be beneficial.

The Digital Public Library of America culls together material from various institutions, including the Smithsonian, the Hathi Trust, and the New York Public Library, making it possible to search across numerous collections. The DPLA also creates online exhibitions and sources app designs from among other places, the Harvard Innovation Lab.

Figure 1

The DPLA’s homepage (Figure 1) is a strong point of its design – the sections are separated by squares and not white space, but the text is minimal and the images are the focus. The search bar is easy to find. The navigation buttons along the top (“About” through “Donate” and lower, “Home” through “Apps”) are in terms easy to understand. The options to Explore “by Place” or “by Date” are indicative of the options to refine search results by useful criteria when searching for a particular item. The photo of suffragettes is on a rotation, displaying more photos in the collection.

Figure 2

The item page (Figure 2) again is simple in design, foregrounding the “Subject” tags. The image of the item is a bit small, especially when considering an image-based collection such as the FSA. The URL provides a permalink to the collecting institution, in this case the Smithsonian, and usually these institutions provide more metadata. The provenance is a noticeable lack in the metadata displayed by the DPLA, but the rights are noted.

Figure 3

The exhibition page (Figure 3) offers, similarly to the homepage, a title and a representative image. Within some exhibitions, sub “Themes” allow for further narrowing of the topic. Images (right) are accompanied by text (left) and the various themes can be navigated through by a drop-down menu (upper right). While some exhibitions are small collections of images (for instance 4 in Activism in the U.S. > Women’s Activism), there are often several themes or more specific subcategories within an exhibition.

Whereas the goal of the DPLA was to allow searchability and better visualization of data across multiple institutions, as reflected in the design, the goal of the Internet Archive is to collect and provide download access to as much multi-media as possible.

Figure 4

The Internet Archive homepage (Figure 4), as distinct from the DPLA’s, is full of information. Less focus is on aesthetically pleasing design and more on functionality of design. The search bar is also prominent, but it is not displayed with a series of highlighted images from the collection. The categories listed on the homepage allow for narrower, specific searching immediately by media type (Text, Audio, etc.) rather than refined browsing.

Figure 5

Similarly, the item page (Figure 5) is taken up mostly by file formats for download. Access, through downloading (or streaming), is the goal of the Internet Archive, which foregrounds the backend of the item. The image (here of Bob Hope, upper left) or thumbnail of the media item is secondary, taking up less of the page. The metadata is available as an XML download, but it not displayed on the page.

The Whitney Museum, like MoMA, has digitized part of its physical collection, and made it available for browsing and creation of user collections online.

Figure 6

The navigation bar (“Visit” to “About”) remains constant on each page, and when mousing over the “Collection” option, a drop-down menu appears (Figure 6). The Whitney includes their digital collection, current exhibitions, rights information, conservation information alongside browsability options. Searching for a specific item may be more difficult than browsing the collection and the site is formatted less for this option. Search is reached by the magnifying glass in the upper right corner; not by the common and much larger search bar. 677 of over 19,000 works of art are included in the Whitney’s digital collection, and works are being added “on an ongoing basis.”

Figure 7

Browsing the “Works Available Online” by thumbnails yields a page of images, which when moused over reveal basic metadata (Figure 7). The works are primarily visual, which is why the collection defaults to thumbnail view, rather than list view.

Figure 8

The item page (Figure 8) places emphasis on the image of the work as well. However, the design’s clean lines and ample use of white space become a problem on the item pages. Where the rest of the website is clear and uncluttered, here the title of the work is almost too big and surrounded by too much white space. The image, while large, must be scrolled down to. The options of “Related exhibitions online,” “Watch and Listen,” and “User collections” listed above the image and under the title are also given their own sections under the image (Figure 9).

Figure 9

Below the image on the item page the white space is used better; two complete sections fit in the window. The metadata for the work is provided, but as it required mousing over on the browse page, here it is listed in smaller, gray instead of black print underneath the image (Figure 10).

Figure 10

MoMA’s online collection most closely matches the Whitney’s, in terms of both function and design. Pointers can also be taken from the DPLA and the Internet Archive in looking for alternatives or pitfalls to online collections.

Figure 11

MoMA’s item page (Figure 11) shares qualities with the Whitney’s, but the two column design places importance on both the image and the metadata. More information is available at a glance, without scrolling, and image quality and size are not compromised, as on the DPLA’s item page. The “Save” option in the upper right directs to user collections, a feature mentioned for consideration earlier and already in use at MoMA. Copyright and permissions, a potential pitfall also mentioned, is addressed with the “Image Permissions” link in the bottom left. Missing notably are options to share on social media. The Facebook and Twitter icons remained constant on the Whitney’s collection pages and a “Share” option was included at the top of the item page, above the image.

Ease of use is always an important consideration in design, but where aesthetics meets useability is the ideal design. The DPLA offers good examples of homepage and online exhibition design that can be put to use in building online exhibitions. The Internet Archive illustrates design for useability, but the aesthetic quality is lacking. The Whitney’s focus on design goes in the opposite direction from the Internet Archive, but the Whitney places importance on sharing that MoMA could do more of. MoMA’s current online collection design could be adapted for digitizing the FSA with only minor changes to reflect these lessons in combining aesthetics and useability and encouraging sharing.

VI.

The FSA is an important collection historically, in restoring old films and in giving us a more comprehensive view of old films, as well as artistically. The many artists who contribute to one film still, from the director, to the cinematographer, to the actors, to the actual still photographer are often not recognized, even in film credits. The contribution of these varied people to the art world via these film stills is unquestionably valuable.

Digitizing this collection will not physically preserve the images and negatives, but physical preservation is not the goal. Access and awareness are the goals. The collection is important enough to be preserved in its physical form at the Celeste Bartos Film Preservation Center, but keeping it in climate-controlled vaults is only half of preservation. Access is another element of preserving and the importance of this collection to historians and researchers makes it necessary to provide some form of access. Digital also offers opportunities to expand the audience of the collection through features digital can offer that a physical museum and exhibition cannot. Tapping into the communities of the filmmakers, historians, journalists, and amateur bloggers who already appreciate the collection can bring in new audiences, through linkages and allowing sharing online. Personal digital collections is another feature of digital archives that MoMA already uses, which engages the audience with the collection in a different way. Allowing users to interact with the collection in different ways than the physical space allows is the key to effective digital archives.

(For some reason the end notes do not appear here, but I can provide them and a works consulted list if you’re interested.-MW)