A cool little article about home movie preservation. I was really lucky in that I was able to get my family’s 8mm home movies digitized in exchange for the work I did at a film preservation company, but a lot of people aren’t as fortunate. However, it’s so important to preserve these materials, not only for their value to your family, but as a cultural artifact in itself. It’s amazing how much appreciation people will have for these things. Just look at the response people had to my video on hitRECord-it wasn’t their family’s home movies they were looking at, but it struck a chord with so many people. That’s what film preservation is really about for me-preserving that moment in time and causing someone to feel SOMETHING. THIS is why I’m so passionate about film preservation and why I want to make it my career. If you have home movies on film, VHS, hard drives, whatever-do your best to preserve them-hell, pool the family money and get them digitized-you’ll find when it’s split up amongst multiple people, it’s not nearly as steep-but do what it takes to make sure these things survive in the best possible condition, because they’re a part of history.
hitRECorders might also want to take note of the paragraph at the bottom of the article:
With so many electronic devices now able to take video and so many social sharing sites, what issues does this create with archiving and copyrights?
I think the most important issue is that what you might call the archiving timeline has shortened drastically, while the copyright timeline has only gotten longer. Digital formats age very quickly — chances are the digital camera or phone you use now isn’t the one you used five or even three years ago, and it won’t be the one you’re using three years from now. Even though hardware, software and file formats all become obsolete quickly, very, very few people are making an effort to back up their files regularly, or convert them to newer formats. Sites like YouTube or Facebook are thought of and treated like permanent repositories, but they have no public service mission — they are intended to make money. When and if they stop being profitable (or if they never make a profit in the first place), those sites can shut down very quickly, and they have no obligation to retain users’ uploaded media any longer than necessary.
Copyright, on the other hand, originally expired after just a few decades. It now lasts 120 years from date of fixation for unpublished materials, or the life of the author plus 70 years. The images made and shared online today are protected by copyright laws now, and they take longer and longer to enter the public domain, even as they get easier and easier to share, distribute and use in violation of those copyright protections. These images will also remain under copyright — as most 20th century creations still are — for a long, long time to come.
I love that hitRECord is unique in the fact you can’t really delete RECords-and I LOVE that. I’m really curious about how hitRECord is archiving everything though-what servers they are using, if they’re using cloud storage, how they’re going to ensure these RECords stay around for a long time, etc. I also know Joe mentioned something about how they’re trying to find a better solution than viddler for videos, so it’d be interesting to look at other options for that and how, if they do find a better way to host videos, how they’re planning on migrating existing RECords. I think this might be a good research project for me in the near future for school (plus, I’d be crazy not to jump at a chance to combine my academic program with something hitRECord related).
Anyway, film archives, hitRECord, happiness.
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