0.12 The evia digital archive project: challenges and solutions

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Introduction

This presentation will provide an overview of the EVIA Digital Archive Project with a focus on issues related to scholarly publishing and our efforts to sustain the project. The EVIA Project can be accessed online at www.eviada.org . Despite the growth of video availability online in the last five years and the emergence of tools for working with video, the EVIA Project is unique in its combination of preservation, annotation, and scholarly publishing.

In the past year the project has passed a critical milestone by making its first collections public. The EVIA Project currently has seven diverse collections available online which represents seventy hours of annotated video. Another 1,200 hours are in various stages of completion. We have created a means of sustaining the project but are constantly re-evaluating its viability, stretching its boundaries, and examining the landscape in which it must compete.

Project overview

The EVIA Digital Archive Project is an endeavor to create a digital archive of ethnographic field video for use by scholars and instructors. Funded between 2001 and 2009 by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation with significant contributions from Indiana University and the University of Michigan, the Project has been developed through the joint efforts of ethnographic scholars, archivists, librarians, technologists, and legal experts. The EVIA Project has invested significantly in the creation of software and systems for the annotation, discovery, playback, peer review, and scholarly publication of video and accompanying descriptions. These efforts are by necessity collaborative and have reached across disciplines and institutional domains. From a disciplinary point of view, we are working with scholars in the fields of ethnomusicology, folklore, anthropology, and dance ethnology, and are dependent on experts in the fields of archiving, library science, copyright law, video technology, and software development. From a systems development point of view, we have tried to build a platform that addresses general preservation and publication needs and to create tools that can be used by a variety of disciplines and professions.

In many ways this project has underscored the interconnections that have long been part of the scholarly endeavor—scholars need primary sources and the tools to find them, they need to extend the boundaries of their discipline, and they need to master the technologies they use to generate and disseminate knowledge and media. At the same time, this project has highlighted both longstanding gaps and emerging structural weaknesses created by digital technologies—the distance between scholarly work and media archiving has typically been too great, most scholars do not understand the principles of cataloging well enough, and some scholars are generating large amounts of research and documentary media without a good understanding of how to preserve it, document it, and provide access to it.