MIC

For the past year, the Academic Film Archive of North America has been assisting the Library of Congress in developing its Moving Image Collections (MIC) initiative. As a Beta site, we have been working with Jane Johnson, MIC Project Manager at the LOC to ensure the uploading integrity of our own archive’s records, which will eventually be accessible to the public. As a test site, several of our recommendations have been incorporated into the data fields that will eventually be used by all moving image archives.

Here is a quick review of several of the more important aspects to the MIC initiative…

1) What is MIC?

MIC is a joint partnership between the Library of Congress and the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AFA director Geoff Alexander is a lifetime member). MIC aims to document all archival moving images existing in the holdings of the world’s moving image archives. The Library of Congress is committed to supporting MIC as a key access initiative of its new National Audio Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia (NAVCC). The Library will provide the staffing for MIC’s long-term maintenance and ongoing development. The MIC Architect is Grace Agnew, the Associate University Librarian for Digital Library Systems at Rutgers University.

The MIC umbrella encapsulates several sub-initiatives, including the Union Catalogue and the Archive Directory.

The Union Catalogue may eventually be perceived as the world’s film catalogue. Any film archive, in any country, will, when Beta is complete, be able to submit its database records to the Union catalogue. This will allow film researchers and the public at large to search for any film within the catalogue, and determine in which archive(s) it resides. Beyond general interest, this capability will be used by preservationists to locate sister prints of films needing formal restoration. It will help determine which films are truly “lost”, thereby creating momentum for preserving important films where minimal numbers of copies are identified.

The Archive Directory lists contact and collection information for archives all over the world.

2) How do you define “archival moving images”?

Moving images can be film, video, or digital files. Audio recordings, when associated with moving images (e.g., soundtracks) are also within our scope. We define archival moving images as those intended to be kept so that they may be available for future generations, regardless of their age at the time of acquisition.

For the Archive Directory and Union Catalogue, individuals holding archival moving images, and their collections, may also be listed. Collections can be of any size, and do not have to be accessible to the public. Access policies and restrictions are clearly displayed to users.

3) Who hosts the digital video (where is it stored)?

The digital videos linked from MIC’s Union Catalogue records are stored locally with each organization. MIC does not host digital files at this time.

4) Is MIC international in scope, and what accommodations have you made to an international audience?

MIC is international in scope. Given that AMIA is largely a North American organization with a very active Canadian membership, we have a clear mandate to accommodate multilingualism down the line. We have successfully implemented Unicode in the Union Catalogue, and have mapped diacritics for Archive Directory displays.

5) Beyond cataloguing, what does MIC offer to film archivists as well as the public at large?

MIC is intended to be a tool for discovery, for moving images (descriptions and the images themselves in the Union Catalogue), for organizations holding moving images (the Archive Directory), and for information about moving images and their preservation, management - Informational resources.

It will be a tool for community building, a collaboration space where archivists, preservationists, researchers, and scholars can join together to discuss common issues and projects.

MIC is also a tool for R&D in emerging technologies. Bibliographic records will be accessible representing a cross section of the archival moving image community and available in a variety of metadata schemas. Computer science researchers and the archival community can partner to explore issues such as digital rights management, active privacy policies, and fair use, or low-level indexing such as facial recognition. Information scientists are provided a testbed for research into authority control, events-based directories, and FRBR implementations.

6) When will MIC be fully operational?

MIC is an ongoing, iterative process now in its formative stages. Currently, there is a major focus in enhancing the mapping utility, which allows archives to upload data to the Union Catalogue. Several aspects of MIC are accessible now. Visit the MIC site at: http://mic.loc.gov to follow its progress.

Hit Counter