40 GENIUS INTERVIEW Stephen McConnachie, BFI
FEED: What brought you to the film preservation wing of the BFI?
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STEPHEN McCONNACHIE: My bachelor’s degree was in English literature – a long time ago. I got interested in film and started to write about how film and literature align – or don’t. So my masters degree was in film and television studies at Warwick University. My first main job after university was in Berkhamsted at the BFI National Archive. The job was looking at unexamined collections that hadn’t been documented and weren’t well understood. My job was literally opening film cans and examining the contents, playing them and coming to some decisions about whether they would be put into the national collection or not. If they were, we had to document and assess them. After a few years I got interested in the systems. A new system was developed for that work, and that was the trigger for phase two of my career, when I became more interested in the systems than the films. FEED: What kinds of new systems were you developing? SM: The systems we created were about enabling the people who opened the can to document the film in the database. The person handling the film became the cataloguer of the film. It was a new model. It’s quite common now, but at the time it was an exciting new thing. Before that there had been a workflow where someone would be the film examiner, they’d pass the details to another person who would
be the cataloguer, and so on. The in-house BFI system was developed to let us do all of that directly. It set off a light bulb in my head, and I realised I was interested in systems and data, and system architecture.
big publically funded project to build a new collections management system, a database to document all of the collections, digital and analogue. The BFI National Archive has one of the biggest moving image collections in the world. It was established in 1935, so it’s also one of the oldest. But its management systems were disparate – there were many of them and they didn’t join up or integrate, and they didn’t have open APIs. We established new systems that have REST APIs that can deliver data in and out over networks, including the internet. That’s a revolution because it makes integration between systems more possible via API calls. We bought and bespoked an Adlib collections management system from Axiell and deployed a new data model that had just been ratified in the moving image world, which was based on a hierarchy. Because we had built that big database system, we could integrate it into our digital preservation system when it came time to procure that. We were very lucky to get another public budget from our ‘Unlocking Film Heritage’ programme to spend on a digital preservation infrastructure. The ability to integrate these systems was a consequence of buying solutions that had open REST APIs, which means you can integrate systems. Instead of a collection being a closed box, it becomes a box that springs open on command. It allows you to deliver your media from your servers to your web applications via API integrations. And that’s what we do now. We can build collections access portals; we have one at the South Bank called the Media Tech which is built on top of these open REST APIs. It lets anyone go to our BFI location at London South Bank and watch any of the television and film titles that we have digitised. FEED: How do you prioritise the digitisation of material in the archives? SM: We tend to work in five-year strategic blocks. Our previous five years was called ‘Film Forever’, and within that there was a project called “Unlocking Film Heritage”. For that we digitised 10,000 films – 5000
FEED: So what did you do after that?
SM: I left the BFI and went to television, to the ITN Archive for TV news. TV was ahead of film at that point in systems development. I got to be in the first wave of digital asset management and digital preservation systems that were being rolled out in the TV world. I was heavily involved in systems development for data creation, cataloguing and documentation – also with web access, so the data could feed web applications – and I was involved in digital preservation with data tape libraries that were being deployed to store news footage. I was there for nearly ten years, then an opportunity came up at the BFI archive in 2009 and I came back. FEED: When you returned to the BFI, what new implementations were there? How did the archive developed?
SM: At the time I arrived there was a
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