0.15 A response to the responses of john unsworth and john rink on

image -->

My article on the challenges faced by the EVIA Digital Archive Project, the solutions we have chosen, and key questions with which we are wrestling generated a lively dialog with my respondents. Their responses raise fair questions about our project, but they also warrant a formal response for the sake of clarity. I will address in sequence the issues and questions they raise in an attempt to clear up any confusion and to move the dialog further towards useful solutions.

John Unsworth begins by wondering if in fact three different persons wrote my article. I can confirm that I was its sole author, but his question about different voices in the paper perhaps points to the multi-dimensional nature of the project. It has been our vision to bring more closely together the worlds of field research, archiving, and scholarly publishing. The EVIA Project has never been the pet research of one particular scholar and it has been by necessity highly collaborative in its development. This may account for what John sees as an internal conflict among priorities. While preservation was the primary impetus of the project, what emerged in our year-long planning process was an endeavor to integrate preservation, documentation strategies, research tools, cataloging, scholarly publishing and online access into a systematic whole. This multidimensional approach was not the result of mission creep but was established at the outset and was part of the original development-phase funding. We have had our share of feature expansion in our software development, but the mission of the project has not changed significantly. “Mission-creep,” as John identifies at the core of his response, is inaccurate both from the standpoint of the ambitious goals set at the beginning of the project, but is also not fair from the perspective of the digital landscape in which this project operates. When the EVIA Project began as a series of discussions in 2001, YouTube was still four years in the future, video streaming was difficult and rare, no best practices existed for audio preservation let alone video, and a terabyte sounded like an awful lot of storage space. The EVIA Project has had to push a lot of software, hardware, and infrastructure boundaries during its development and it has needed room to explore solutions, step back and try different routes. The EVIA Project has been less about a bounded one-off digital edition and more about systems, workflows, and scholarly practices in an area with few precedents and a need for exploration.

What emerges in Unsworth’s response is an argument for putting preservation first. Given the crisis we face in the world of media preservation, I strongly agree. The emerging consensus of media archivists is that we have less than twenty years to digitally transfer and preserve all of the audio and video media that we want to survive into the future. Despite the efforts of such notable institutions as the Library of Congress, Stanford, Indiana University, the National Library of Australia, and others, the infrastructure for saving our media heritage is not nearly large enough to meet the challenges we face. That said, in the world of archiving, preservation and access are inextricable, both from the perspective of the archival mission and practices and from the standpoint of funding. Audiovisual preservation requires different technologies and different skill sets from access development, but they are of a piece. At the Archives of Traditional Music, we do not even accept a collection for deposit if we cannot provide at least some minimal access to it. When we make the difficult decisions about what recordings to preserve and what to hold off for yet another round of funding, questions of its accessibility are figured into our analysis. It also does little good to preserve an item if no one can find it, so the cataloging and collection of metadata are critical dimensions of the digital preservation process. Most funders recognize the interrelated nature of the preservation and access matrix. The sources for audiovisual preservation are woefully small, but the primary one for ethnographic media archives such as ours is NEH, and an applicant can’t simply request to preserve a collection without providing access of some sort.