Tom Wilson is Digital Preservation Archivist at the British Film Institute National Archive
So, let’s address the first elephant in the room. I’m aware that a SIP is a Submission Information Package, i.e., an input into a system. I’m also aware that “sipping from” implies taking something out, but the pun was too good to pass on!
The second elephant in the room (at least, in the rooms I frequent at work), is the one regarding the “new” digital preservation practices that we are implementing for Our Screen Heritage, the new, major, national lottery-funded project at the British Film Institute (BFI) National Archive. The digital preservation team at the Archive have heard our colleagues talking about us implementing new and groundbreaking ideas and practices for digital preservation of born-digital documents. Whilst this may well be true within the context of BFI, we cannot make any such claim outside of the BFI. Happily, the community theme of World Digital Preservation Day gives us an ideal opportunity to acknowledge and thank the digital preservation community for their generously shared knowledge and experience.
To give a little institutional context and background, the BFI has been on the go for a long time, since 1933 to be precise, and has a long history of supporting and championing the British film industry and its creatives. Part of the work done by the BFI includes preserving films on a variety of carriers and we have many kilometres of physical film spooled into our vaults, which, if unspooled, would stretch more than 3.5 times around Earth![i] BFI have also been recording live television off air since the 1980s as part of our work to preserve Britain’s moving image heritage, with the associated processes adapting as broadcasting practices moved from analogue to digital. BFI now has many Petabytes of preserved data from this activity alone and, if all these data tapes were unspooled, a lot of people would be very unhappy!
So, the BFI National Archive is pretty good at preserving moving image, whether that’s in physical or digital format, but what about other records associated with moving image? BFI does have a paper archive, also known as our Special Collections, which contains many unique and interesting records from the film-making industry, including BFI National Archive’s first accession in 1934. Special collections hold records such as scripts, set design notes, costume sketches, and film posters, to name just a few things. This is another well-established part of the BFI National Archive that spans many decades of physical material. Digital records in this area, however, are a new challenge for us, so part of the new lottery project will be to establish the necessary processes and systems for BFI to preserve these digital records.
Our Screen Heritage aims to bring the UK’s national collection of moving images up to date by acquiring and preserving the story of moving image in the digital/online era and reflecting the diversity and richness of contemporary Britain today. There are five strands to the project that consider the different aspects of moving image and its creation, including the “script-to-screen” strand. In “script-to-screen” we are looking at what records directors create during the film-making process, how this looks when born-digital and how we can preserve these records for the future.
For this strand, we are fortunate to be working with two British directors, Gurinder Chadha (known for films such as “Bend it Like Beckham” (2002) and “Viceroy’s House” (2017))[ii] and Amma Asante (known for films such as “Belle” (2013) and “Where Hands Touch” (2018))[iii]. Gurinder and Amma are generously donating their born-digital archives and time to BFI as part of this project and their archives will become the first born-digital document accessions to BFI’s Special Collections.
We have also procured for the purposes of this work an instance of Archivematica and AtoM, with the intent to later make these archives accessible in the BFI Reuben library, at BFI Southbank in London, as well as for staff at BFI National Archive’s conservation centre, in Berkhamsted.
Although we are only in the initial stages of the project, the help that we have received from the digital preservation community already has been considerable. I include in this the various conferences we have attended, the papers, article and blogs read, conversations with fellow practitioners, resources freely available online and training, all of which would be too numerous to list here. We would, however, like to give a special shout out to the Digital Preservation Coalition[iv], who have been of particular help recently. The recently established working group on FRED workstations has greatly facilitated our start in our project and, on a personal note, the novice-to-know-how training on email preservation has already been put to good use in the planning stages of the project! We also recently had a visit from Andy Jackson, Preservation Registries Technical Architect at the DPC, to discuss BFI’s work and the project and have come away with new thoughts and tools to consider. In addition to that, it’s always reassuring to have an external expert look at the work and say ‘this all makes sense’ at any stage in a project!
To sum up, being able to drink from the fount that is the collective knowledge and expertise of the digital preservation community is a great asset for any practitioner or institution, whatever stage they are at in their digital preservation journey. Happily, I don’t think the fount will ever dry up, as the community keeps generously topping it up all the time. I will finish there, as all this talk of drink and founts has left me in need of a cup of tea!
[i] https://www.bfi.org.uk/about-bfi
[ii] https://www.benditnetworks.com/filmography/
[iii] https://www.ammaasante.com/
[iv] https://www.dpconline.org/