That’s the question that Josef Marc from Front Porch Digital was contemplating at the start of his presentation at the AMIA conference on Friday titled, “Content Storage Management vs. HSM in A/V Archiving." The world of environmentally controlled physical storage is well established and well known. As media archives make the transition to digital platforms and digitally stored assets there is the need to define what that really means for archive practice. What then are the standards and good practices needed to manage file quality and integrity and then prolong its lifespan as needed throughout the various changes in platforms and technologies that will inevitably come over time?
This presentation gave an overview of the basic systems and service layers involved in digital storage and highlighted some of the specific challenges for A/V archives. It also explained the strengths and weaknesses of both CSM and HSM film management solutions.
The second half of the session was by Jim Lindner of Media Matters. He used amusing video clips of The Three Stooges along with simple workflow diagrams to illustrate the need to manage the digital “water" flowing thru our pipes and that we need to really understand where the blockages to productivity may be before adding more pipes to the problem.
Understanding effective workflow and refining it to remove obstacles will increase the throughput to a digital environment. That is the goal…all the other decisions about the file, the physical master and the content within can now be made a later time as priorities and resources dictate because the urgency driven by physical asset deterioration or equipment obsolescence are now gone.
These two presentations and other sessions from the conference make clear that the role of the archivist is changing… it will be different (if it's not already) for many very soon. Archive managers need to get busy defining the workspace for applying good archive practice along with the good technology available….this is not something to be left exclusively to engineers. Good partnerships need to exist to create the definition of what an archive will be in this digital space and then become a roadmap to build the systems and solutions to support that vision. We are all going to become Digital Content Managers able to collect, manage and make accessible our assets digitally without the limitations of physical media.
What gems will we be discovering?