{"id":5880,"title":"Economics of Physical Preservation Panel","kind":"book","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/node/5880","version":"30edb4694ab56be6c2cdc48c1fedcec67c6274fff5aa8b8846b4fe2e79e70aa4","modified":"2026-09-15T19:02:06.0677207+00:00","credits":[],"authorKeys":[],"subjects":[],"metadata":[{"label":"Publication type","value":"Web Article","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Economics of Physical Preservation Panel.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/node/5880.","publication":"Economics of Physical Preservation Panel.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/5880.ris"},"links":[{"label":"Looking Back/Looking Forward: A Symposium on Electronic Media Preservation","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/looking-backlooking-forward","relationship":"record body link","contentType":null}],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":38696},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":707}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"Looking Back/Looking Forward: A Symposium on Electronic Media Preservation: contents Presenters: Kate Horsfield (Video Data Bank), Lisa Steele (V Tape), Kim Tomczak (V Tape), and John Thomson (Electronic Arts Intermix) Kate Horsfield, Kid Tomczak, Lisa Steele and John Thomson KATE HORSFIELD: All of us who are sitting up here right now have been asked to address the economic issues of preservation. There was only a one-line sentence, so I\u2019m sure this is going to be a very broad range of takes on this topic. It is of course, a central topic. I\u2019m going to briefly describe the Video Data Bank, and talk about what our collection is like--the scale of it and what formats we have. This is to give you a picture, actually a profile, of one organization and the problems we\u2019re dealing with in terms of preservation. The Video Data Bank was started by a man named Phil Morton. It was started as an adjunct collection to the video department at the School of the Art Institute in 1972, so early on it began as a collection. The first focus of the collection was to keep a record of student produced works that were coming out of the video department, and a record of the visiting speakers who came through the school. The collection started on three-quarter inch--it never actually started on half-inch open reel. When I came on the premises in 1976, it was a collection of about one hundred tapes, mostly internal, and exclusively for internal use; 90% of it was student work and the other 10% were people like Anais Nin and people who\u2019d been invited to the school to speak. When my partner Lynn Blumenthal and I were hired in 1976, it had been moved from the video department to the library of the school, because the dean had recognized the importance of the collection. The video department was sort of allowing students to work over titles and a lot of things were getting lost. Some incredibly important documents did get lost. A four hour presentation by Anais Nin is gone; the first recorded trip of Joseph Beuys to Chicago in 1973 or 1974, where he gave a six hour lecture. They were diligent about recording things, but they were very poor about understanding the importance of what had actually been recorded. Twenty-six or twenty-eight years later, we now have a collection of roughly five thousand tapes in all formats, going all the way back from half-inch open reel up to mini DV, which seems to be the prevailing format of use by artists these days. So it\u2019s grown; it is a huge collection. There are days when I walk in there in the morning and think: I can\u2019t take another second of this! What has happened is we started out with very good intentions about production, and now that ratio has shifted dramatically; it literally shifts by the day, by the week. I\u2019d have to say that, while we\u2019re mostly known as a distributor, the value shift in the required tasks really means that in order to stay in distribution, we have to concentrate on preservation. When we first started our preservation program, it came because we had inherited about 50% of the original collection of Castelli-Sonnabend Gallery, the first assembled collection that I know of in New York City in the early seventies. They went out of business with video, for all of the obvious reasons; you could list them on two hands. It wasn\u2019t making any money; it was too much work; all the tapes needed an immense amount of cataloging and maintenance. None of this was being done properly and finally they became overwhelmed and said, \u201CWe\u2019re out of here.\u201D So Electronic Arts got part of the collection and we got the other part of the collection. In a way this was the beginning of our preservation program because these tapes were on half-inch open reel. Simultaneously, my partner Lynn and I had started on a project which was recording interviews with artists in 1974. We started with people who\u2019d never been recorded on video before, like Lee Krasner, Agnes Martin, Joseph Beuys, and so we have an incredible collection of interviews with artists, that numbers about 375. It is an ongoing collection and we do it routinely; we make anywhere from fifteen to twenty tapes a year. So that collection is also incredibly important and needs enormous amounts of preservation. In that case, we have the source tapes (sometimes that can be four to one), and we have an aging collection of master edits on three-quarter inch. I won\u2019t go into details, but I\u2019ll try to give an overview of what I think we\u2019re all up against. At this point in time, we have managed to archive 175 titles. In 1997, we had Allen Lewis from the Library of Congress come out and make recommendations for us about how to handle our collection, and how to make a professional archival collection. From his report we have been very diligent about making archival sets. We make one BetaCam SP preservation master; we make what we call a safety; we have a one pass VHS that is made simultaneously. That is one archival set, and actually some of these sets are stored off the premises. We are very proud that we have managed to archive 175 titles, and they are all in really good shape. We still have 700 half-inch open reel tapes, partly because of my enthusiasm over acquiring the entire collection of the Video Freex. This was work, made from the late sixties through about 1973 or 1974, that represents about 600 tapes that we\u2019re in the process of archiving but do not have the money to restore. Because we started too early, we have 1600 three-quarter inch tapes and as everybody knows, three-quarter inch was a workhorse format but is now obsolete. We have 65 one-inch tapes that were the first results of our preservation process in the eighties. One-inch is now obsolete. When you add this all up, at the moment we are sitting on 2,365 tapes that need some form of preservation. We\u2019re just talking about transferring or migrating from one format to BetaCam SP. We\u2019ve always worked with BAVC, who have what I consider reasonable prices. Kacey told me that it was about one fifty per one hour title; I estimated in my calculations that it was roughly two hundred, because something always seems to come up. It is interesting if you calculate this out. We have 2,365 titles and if we spent two hundred dollars per title that would cost 473,000 dollars to archive all the work. This, of course, is impossible. When you look at our overall project budget, we dedicated roughly 5% of our earned income towards preservation, which is about three or four thousand dollars per year. This is ongoing preservation; it has nothing to do with funded projects, which is another category altogether. So at best, if nothing else is happening, if we\u2019re not getting money from the National Endowment from the Arts or some other source, we proceed with archiving fifteen titles a year at a rough cost of between three and four thousand dollars. If we operate at fifteen titles per year, to get through our incredible list of 2,365 titles, is going to take 157 years for us to get our collection archived! I\u2019m only saying that because it is really funny, but when I walk into my office every morning, it\u2019s not funny to me. I think for all of us old timers who\u2019ve been around forever, we want to go into the woods feeling that we\u2019ve accomplished something. On the other hand, every day it gets more and more complex. The multi-formats -- we don\u2019t really know how long BetaCam SP is going to be considered to be the preservation format. Then we have this whole slew of new problems with high-8, video 8 and DV. There are days when I just want to get into my car and drive west and forget the whole thing--it is too much. But of course, I\u2019m not really going to do that. But I wanted to point that out to you because if you add up the numbers of all the collections of all that we represent here in this world, it\u2019s really an amazing story. It is an incredible public record. From the experiments that Woody and Steina were doing, to the work that the VideoFreex were doing, between those two polarities we have an incredible view of the world that does not exist anywhere except on videotape. A lot of it still exists on half-inch open reel. When Mona and I were sitting around talking, I said, \u201CIf you tell me where I could get one of those machines that BAVC has, I will try to do what I think all of us have always tried to do, which is to do self-empowerment.\u201D In other words, I can not sit around and wait for the grant money to roll in. Being an organization that exists partially off public and foundation funding, I can\u2019t say every single year, \u201CWe\u2019re going to go for preservation money.\u201D I have to shift back and forth between general operations: I have to worry about our streaming server and keeping up with the advancements in the field, and I also have a preservation program. Every year it is a tremendously hard task to decide what kind of grants we\u2019re actually going to write, and what we think we can accomplish. With the decrease in funding in the United States that first started in 1994 and now seems to continue in an even more rapid vein, post 9/11, you know, all of this gets to be relatively scary. I can\u2019t say, \u201CI really am committed to the idea of preservation, and here\u2019s what we\u2019re going to do: every single grant for the next five years is going to be written for preservation.\u201D I have other concerns. We have to maintain a balancing act in the center of the whole thing, and that slows us down enormously. I think the solution is self-empowerment, to some degree or another. That\u2019s where this whole thing with Mona came up about, \u201CHow do I get one of those machines?\u201D because if I could get that\u2026 One of the really good things about our location in Chicago is that I have an endless amount of fabulous graduate students. I hate to call them cheap labor, but they are cheap labor and a lot of them are very, very good. I can get somebody cleaning in the background for a relatively small amount of money, like eleven or twelve dollars an hour, which today is very cheap labor. It is in my interest to figure out how to do it. As much as I love BAVC, I don\u2019t have two hundred dollars to spend for title and that\u2019s just the reality of the situation. So we\u2019ve got these 700 tapes that need to be archived but also need to be catalogued. But I want to continue with the idea of empowerment, because somebody brought up the tape check machine. For at least seven years, Scott Jenke and I have had a conversation about every four months. I say to him, \u201CYou tell me where I could go on the web and find a used three-quarter inch tape check machine.\u201D He was never particularly forthcoming with this, but finally he said to me, \u201CI\u2019ll set up a deal for you so that you can buy one with time payments.\u201D And I said, \u201CWe can\u2019t use time payments. We\u2019re at the Art Institute of Chicago, and they forbid this.\u201D So he said, \u201CAlright, I\u2019ll figure out something internal.\u201D A year ago, we bought one and I agree that the evaluator is just a waste of money. In fact, we have internally set up a three-quarter inch remastering workstation in our office. It is primitive compared to BAVC, but the thing is I can keep it going. I can leave my office feeling like we\u2019re getting somewhere. I can see those tapes go through that machine -- and yes, they have to go through sometimes ten or fifteen times-- but we\u2019re getting good results. There\u2019s somebody doing it on a relatively regular basis, which keeps my anxiety level down. (I don\u2019t know exactly how to handle the half-inch open reel.) In the meantime, we\u2019ve taken it upon ourselves to set up this preservation workstation, and we can start on the 1600 three-quarter inch tapes we have in our collection. That makes me feel really good. We also have been working with IMAP, with Jim Hubbard in particular, who was kind enough to come out last summer to help us coordinate our database with their database. We did something really interesting with that. I hired a woman who keyed all of the IMAP -- what do you call th","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":38696,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}