0.12 The evia digital archive project: challenges and solutions  (Page 2/10)

Premise and mission

The primary mission of the EVIA Project is to preserve ethnographic field video created by scholars as part of their research. The secondary mission is to make those materials available in conjunction with rich, descriptive annotations, creating a unique resource for scholars, instructors, and students. The EVIA Project was initially driven by a realization that a large amount of research video had not been deposited in institutional archives and was instead stored in personal collections in improper conditions with little or no access to anyone besides the scholar who made the recordings. In some cases where formats had become functionally obsolete, even the scholar was unable to view his or her own recordings. The ability to preserve these recordings and make them available to other scholars is a cornerstone of the EVIA Project. Even when such recordings have been deposited into an institutional archive, raw ethnographic field video has only been available by visiting these archives, many of which have limited capabilities for providing access to video. In effect, several decades of audiovisual documentation as part of field research has been closed to further research and is now in danger of being lost forever. Out of this core premise we developed an extended research support mission that has built tools and infrastructure to not only preserve and document recordings, but to make them part of the scholarly enterprise through a unique form of peer-reviewed online publication.

To advance this mission, we partnered with the University of Michigan, which had an excellent facility for video transfers and a commitment to large-scale technological innovation. Combining this with the expertise at Indiana University in media preservation and digital libraries, we began with a yearlong planning process where we established the basic concerns of the project and how we would address them.

Collections

At present, we have focused on two primary types of collection development. The first relies on an application process to select scholars to become EVIA Project Fellows and to incorporate ten hours of their research video into the archive. These ten-hour collections are digitally preserved and then prepared for annotation using our software tools. Groups of fellows are brought to Indiana University to participate in a two-week–long summer institute where they are trained and supported in the annotation of their collection.

The second method of content acquisition has been to collaborate with other projects or individuals that have or will generate significant amounts of video content. We work with them to build in preservation and access services for their research video. In these cases, the annotation is less detailed and will not likely be peer-reviewed as the individual scholarly collections will be.

Scholarly publishing

The EVIA Project is unusual in its employment of peer review for video annotations. In addition to establishing bodies of knowledge in which authors have met the standards of their discipline, peer review bolsters the confidence of readers in the quality of information, especially in research subject areas in which they themselves are not experts. It is our intention to create both a stand-alone publication and a resource that can be used in conjunction with other print or online materials. As part of this support for published scholarship, we create persistent URLs (PURLs) for all video segments. These PURLs facilitate long-term access to video content and enable authors to publish links in printed material or to ensure that content linked from within a digital publication will remain in place for the foreseeable future.