With the initiatives like Collections as Data and Computational Archival Science, archives are no longer seen as a static documentation of objects, but evolving sources of cultural and historical data. This work emphasizes the potential updates in preserving and documenting digital audiovisual (AV) content from a data perspective, considering the recent developments in natural language processing and computer vision tasks, as well as the emergence of interactive and embodied experiences and interfaces for innovatively accessing archival content. As part of Swiss national scientific fund Sinergia project, this work was able to work end-to-end with real-world AV archives like Télévision Suisse Romande (RTS). Resorting to an updated narrative model for mapping data that can be obtained from the content as well as the consumer, this work proposed an experimental attempt to build an ontology to formally sum up the potential new paradigm for preservation and accessibility from a data perspective for modern archives, in the hope for nurturing a digital and data-driven mind-set for archive practices.
This paper considers how digitisation can be mobilized by museums as a tool of both photographic preservation and access by placing the materiality of its objects at the fore. Using the digitisation workflow of the acetate negatives in the Berenice Abbott Archive at the Ryerson Image Centre this paper will address these concerns. First, this paper will describe the material aspects of Abbott’s acetate negatives, and the preservation issues in the collection. Second, it will describe the monitoring of vinegar syndrome present in the collection and the development of a digitisation workflow based on acetic acid off-gassing and the development of a priority sequence. Third, this paper will demonstrate how digitisation can be used to preserve and provide access to the object, its condition, and the image without sacrifice.