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

The EVIA Project has been actively engaged in pushing forward strategies that will address the needs of audiovisual collections on the entire IU Bloomington campus and thus leverage the possibilities of a shared resource pool for preservation and access services. We are making important first steps towards these goals.

Funding for the project is currently reliant on two kinds of sources. The first is Indiana University’s Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, which provides a platform from which EVIA Project personnel can pursue new funding and collaborate with existing projects. The second is grant funding from external sources or internal funding for new initiatives and infrastructure development.

Both Rink and Unsworth raise questions about the high cost of the project relative to the amount of video preserved. The EVIA Project began from ground zero. Preservation has been one part of a larger package that has included software development and scholarly summer institutes. Now that we have built a basic framework and system, we can and have taken on additional projects to supplement both the video delivered and in some cases extend the software capabilities. For example, the AHEYM Project will preserve and annotate eight hundred hours of video—nearly twice the amount preserved over the entire Mellon-funded cycles—for less than what it once cost to run the EVIA Project for one year. This is possible because we have now built the framework.

It is fair to ask if the EVIA Project is financially stable, but one could ask the same question of the state of California, which is facing a twenty-billion–dollar deficit next year. After the recent economic downturn, it is easy to question if anything is financially stable. My point is that financial stability is relative and not always reliable. To address Rink’s question more directly: no, the project is not financially stable but it is financially engaged. We have several active grants at present that are funding EVIA-related work, and we have several more in the pipeline. We are situated within Indiana’s Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, which at least gives us a platform and a network from which to pursue further funding. We are actively and successfully working to move key preservation activities into the core functions of special collections support at Indiana University.

The EVIA Project should be considered in terms of how it has built a certain level of cyberinfrastructure. Unsworth stated in an interview with Kevin Guthrie, “Beyond the ACLS Report”:

I like to think of cyberinfrastructure as the middle layer of a cake. The base layer is all of the hardware and basic operating systems-level technology on the network. Fiber optic cables, storage devices, things like that. The icing is made up of specific applications to serve a particular purpose. Software applications and tools that can be shared by different people for different purposes represent the middle layer of the cake and are what we mean by cyberinfrastructure. It is important to point out that cyberinfrastructure is not just equipment or software, it also includes the human interactions, protocols, standards, work processes, and so on, needed to make the system work and to structure collaborative or related activities… All of these elements are part of the "infrastructure. (Guthrie 2007)

In many respects the EVIA project was always about cyberinfrastructure. Mellon did not intend the project to be solely about preservation. Mellon nudged us toward the summer institutes and peer review. Through the EVIA project we established coalitions on the Indiana University campus that cut across library, archive, technology, and faculty units. We developed a set of tools that fit the purposes of the project but always kept larger uses in mind. We created a network of scholars who grappled with a new way of non-linear writing and developed some protocols for doing so. We laid the foundation for a set of problems and challenges in video preservation. We tested and retested software with scholars, improving its fit with scholarly needs and desires with each iteration and development cycle. We pushed at our own university’s technology infrastructure so that mass storage, video transcoding, and database services would be more responsive to the needs of the arts and humanities. We used the networks and the experience we gained on the EVIA Project to create Indiana’s Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities (IDAH). IDAH, in collaboration with other units, has been the home from which we have pursued further-reaching coalitions and external funding that simultaneously expands the content of the EVIA Digital Archive and builds upon the framework created by the EVIA project to improve and expand that very framework. For example, the Ethnomusicology Multimedia Project brings together three different university presses to create a marketing platform that utilizes online audio and video samples for “first books” in ethnomusicology. This project will not only create a way to deliver audio and video samples in conjunction with scholarly books but will also create a web-based annotation tool. We were also a key part of the effort last year to build a coalition of special collections across campus and conduct a detailed survey of all audio, video, and film holdings. We are now set to embark on a preservation planning initiative that we believe will result in a centralized facility for media preservation and digital access at Indiana University. Such an endeavor will create more efficient processes for preservation and access and will dramatically improve our ability to digitally preserve our holdings and those yet to be deposited.

Feedback from scholars participating in the project has been generally positive. Most did not anticipate how much work was involved in video annotation, but at the same time, each successive “class” of fellows has pushed the bar higher in terms of the amount of annotation they provide. Most have found the summer institute to be immensely helpful and enjoyable. They deeply appreciate having the opportunity to share their work in an intense environment with an interdisciplinary group of scholars from a diverse representation of career stages. As for how the content is getting used online, it is too early to report. Users are exploring the site and some instructors are beginning to use it in their courses. We will have to wait longer to have more useful data.

In closing, I value the discussion instigated by John Unsworth’s and John Rink’s responses to my paper and appreciate the assessment they have made. My response has been written for the sake of clarity on issues that I do not think were well understood, and to further the larger discussion on challenges that remain to be solved. I hope that my responses will not be taken as defensive but rather in the spirit of moving us towards a greater understanding of the issues faced by media preservation and by collections of ethnographic material. The responses by Unsworth and Rink have provided a welcome outsider perspective and we will certainly take them under consideration as we continue to develop the EVIA Project and its sustainability.

Bibliography

Guthrie, Kevin. Academic Commons. “Beyond the ACLS Report: An interview with John Unsworth.” December 16, 2007. March 24, 2010 http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/interview/acls-report-interview-john-unsworth.