43 GENIUS INTERVIEW Stephen McConnachie, BFI
NATIONAL SERVICE The BFI National Archive undertakes the huge task of preserving the moving image collection on behalf of the British nation, including film, broadcast and music videos
SM: At the time it was a big no – not to say that it would be a big no if we refreshed our thinking in ten years. Firstly, at the time we procured it was difficult to enter into an agreement with a cloud provider that would give you certainty about where your files were being stored, which legal territory. The BFI National Archive stores the moving image collection on behalf of the British nation. We don’t own the rights –it’s not a commercial exercise. We had to guarantee that the national collection is stored in the UK. Another reason was the network implications of getting your files to the cloud. Don’t forget these files can be two terabytes each and we’re digitising 10,000 of these things, as well as all the other digitisation and acquisition that we do. Shipping of the files from our environment to a cloud provider over the internet is a substantial bandwidth challenge. We do have a big internet breakout but nonetheless, you spend a lot of money and time occupying your network, getting your files from you to the cloud, and then if you want the files back from the cloud to use in your restorations, and so on. And it’s still very costly to spin up a huge 2Gbps or 10Gbps internet connection, especially when you consider the public funding nature of the project. The recommendation of our system integrators was that if we provision data storage on site we would get much more for our money in terms of cost-effective digital preservation.
FEED: Does the BFI have any plans for archiving video material from the internet? SM: It is in our strategy to try and address it. A lot of people are watching a lot of moving image content on the web. We need to find a solution for that, but I’m not going to pretend we have yet. There still is a lot of web archiving that happens. The British Library has the responsibility for archiving the .uk web domain, and there is also a lot of web archiving done by The National Archives in the UK. But archiving the moving image content on the web is not necessarily a solved problem.
FEED: Just choosing what to keep and what not to would be a huge question. SM: The hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute outstrips massively what any organisation, apart from Google, of course, could hope to preserve. How do you even begin to find an angle on that as a preservation challenge for people to look back on in 100 years? Here’s an analogy: we can go to BFI Player and watch film from over 100 years ago. In fact, we’re currently digitising the entire corpus of the Victorian era. We have over 700 films in the collection from Victoria’s reign, with the first of them from 1895. Who’s to say in 100 years whether we’ll be able to watch web video from today? Can we preserve web video to make sure that in 100 years we can view it? FEED: Will it be a public institution that does that? Or will it be whatever Google is then who decides what’s available? SM: That’s a key distinction. The aim of a public archive is to be permanent and to persist through time. The BFI National Archive has been maintained since the 1930s. I believe the oldest moving image archive in the world is at the Imperial War Museum in the UK, which was formed during World War I. The aim of those archives is to persist through time, to guarantee – if you can guarantee – that the public will be able to see that material in 20, 50, 100 years, but it’s not in the mission of Google. As far as I know, they have no stated mission to preserve access to that material through time.
feedzine feed.zine feedmagazine.tv
Powered by FlippingBook