Alice turns 150

The sesquicentennial of the publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is 2015. Happy birthday! The Lewis Carroll Society of North America has information on events and commemorations for Alice150.

Oprah gets archives and goes genealogical

As noted by a BC archivist on the ARCAN-L mailing list (02010 03 09), today's Oprah Show looked at celebrities and their family histories. There are other links you can explore about some of these individuals, including former Friends star Lisa Kudrow who happens to be one of the executive producers of the American reality series Who Do You Think You Are?, which is based on a BBC TV program of the same name. With Oprah's interest in archives, can fame and fortune for archivists be far behind?

Martin Knelman claims Canadian audio-visual heritage at risk, but is it true?

Noted Canadian film critic Martin Knelman published in his column for TheStar.com on February 15, 02010 a piece titled "Audio-visual heritage of nation at risk".

He's responding in part to a devastating fire at CTV's Ottawa studio on February 7, 02010 that resulted in the loss of many broadcast recordings. He also put in an extended plug for the Canadian Broadcast Museum Foundation, an organization founded in 2001 with the goal of creating a Canadian museum of broadcasting history. Knelman erroneously concluded that "The priceless legacy of our national history, as recorded over the past 80 years in our electronic media, is slipping away." He also referred to the CBC having "purged its shelves of outtakes that likely included material of historic value," while "In Victoria, a private station [CHEK-TV] discovered that news footage compiled from 1956 to 1998 had deteriorated beyond repair because of faulty storage conditions."

Outtakes are outtakes for a reason. They are expensive to maintain and preserve and, unless converted into a format suitable for public access, will have little or no use. One reason, however, why an archives acquires outtakes is because other kinds of motion picture elements from a production may not exist.

Knelman disparages Canada's financial commitment to preserving its audio-visual heritage and sums it up ONLY in terms of the Canadian Broadcast Museum Foundation's contribution:

In Canada, with minimal funding from a number of industry and government partners, the broadcasting foundation has articulated the mandate, developed a coalition and built a collection of 16,000 broadcast artifacts. But the required great leap forward can't occur until the deposit of all material at a central agency (comparable to the U.S. Library of Congress) becomes mandatory for all broadcasters. And then a substantial annual budget would be needed to build and maintain an archive.

Supporters of the broadcast museum might wonder why a human rights museum in Manitoba got funded and not a museum with a more direct link to Canada's heritage. I would also argue that Canada's broadcast heritage has been remarkably well preserved at both the provincial and national level thanks to the diligence and on-going efforts of archivists and museum curators. What is remarkable to me about Knelman's opinion piece is the great disservice it does to the archival and museum communities, since he says not one word about them or the great audio-visual broadcast treasures they have been preserving for at least the past quarter-century. Ironcially, a small part of CHEK-TV's motion picture film news footage from the period of loss is preserved by the BC Archives (CHEK TV fonds).

The Library and Archives Canada is the repository of record for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, but in recent years the CBC also began digitizing and mounting some of its own audio, film and video recordings at its CBC Digital Archives. The BC Archives once held a large body of films from CBC Vancouver, but returned those at the request of the CBC. The BC Archives still preserves hundreds if not thousands of hours of CBC and private broadcaster recordings, including off-air recordings created by private individuals. I am fairly certain other provincial archives have similar holdings.

I'm not saying that more can't be done to ensure Canada's important broadcast history remains largely intact, but let's not ignore as Knelman has the extraordinary accomplishments of Canadian archives and museums prior to and continuing in parallel with the Canadian Broadcast Museum Foundation's work.

Archive of American Television (EmmyTVLegends.org)

Back in August 02009 my local newspaper reported on a story from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences about a new Web site it was launching on September 1, 02009 at the URL TVlegends.org that "will have more than 2,000 hours of interviews, some of them more than three hours long, with luminaries like Burnaby-raised Michael J. Fox and Montreal native William Shatner." Today I went looking for this site only to discover it doesn't exist and the URL is likely EmmyTVLegends.org, otherwise known as the Archive of American Televison. The Web site indeed states that "The Archive has collected hundreds of in-depth video interviews with TV's greatest legends and pioneers -- now available worldwide. The interviews can be watched all the way through, or browsed by person, show, topic or profession. Enjoy the site and be sure to visit often -- new interviews and indexes are added regularly." For anyone in cultural studies this site has to be a dream come true. Congratulations to the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation for making this terrific resource freely available.