0.15 A response to the responses of john unsworth and john rink on  (Page 5/7)

Both Unsworth and Rink express concern about the level of detail in the annotations. Because we share that concern, we are actively developing alternative models that will not rely on the detailed and multi-layered annotations that have characterized the project thus far. For example, the AHEYM Project will utilize a more basic form of annotation when it incorporates its materials into the EVIA Project. We are also exploring more basic modes for scholars who want to make their collections available quickly or for collections where the collecting scholar is not available to make the annotations. The metadata structure created by the project is certainly flexible enough to accommodate both less and more detailed approaches to annotation than we have seen thus far.

Unsworth notes that “preservation will always turn on sustainability,” but I think this perspective is only applicable in a relatively small number of high-profile objects or collections. I believe it is more accurate to say that preservation has usually turned on the passions of a small group of people. Historically, preservation has rarely been sustainable. Media archiving is almost always an afterthought, archiving of analog media and documents is patchy, at best, and it has been driven by collectors, enthusiasts and researchers with particular avocations or ideologies. Preservation has always turned on institutional good will and patronage in the past and I don’t see that changing. Indeed, the digital revolution is exposing the true costs of archiving as we must move from passive to active strategies of archiving. Most archiving is dependent on a leap of faith that materials of little interest today will one day be of great value to a small group of people. Government, institutional, foundation, and individual patronage are the ways in which we have preserved things in the past and they are likely to be the primary engines behind preservation in the near future at least.

Despite my rebuttals of some of Unsworth’s key points, I agree that an all-out focus on preservation is warranted. We have perhaps less than twenty years to digitally preserve our legacy video recordings before they disintegrate or become functionally obsolete. Most audiovisual archives remain ill-equipped to handle the looming onslaught of born-digital recordings scholars are creating in the present. The scale of this challenge across the United States requires massive investment from private and public sources. I too am concerned that we are not moving fast enough. One of the challenges we are working to address is how to successfully save our media while at the same time maximizing its value as an academic product.

As I said in my original paper, peer review creates a problem of fixity, which John Unsworth rightly criticized for having a limited view of peer review. John Rink asks if we need peer review at all. Peer review is one convention for adding authority and value to an academic product. In my paper I have perhaps overstated our challenges in the area of peer review. Clearly, scholars write articles, get them peer reviewed, and move forward in their research. They simply write new books and articles as their thinking develops. This ought to be true for video annotations. I described the problems of peer review as one of fixing the content as a static object. The problem of fixity is not just a peer review or publishing problem—it is also an archival problem. My archivist and my cataloger at the Archives of Traditional Music do not want to see a text in process. They don’t want to be continually updating finding aids and catalog records. They only want to do this once, and as director, I only want to pay to do it once. The nature of cataloging and indexing will surely change, but at present, accessioning the materials in our archive and library system is one of the ways we sustain the content and so we must abide by the wisdom of library conventions for locating materials. The risk that young scholars take to invest in digital products is real. This is why peer review is important. Regardless of the possibilities of “crowd-sourcing” and its potential value, I think it is accurate to say that it is not accepted by the professional mechanics of the academy.