A report, a review and some impressions

The 5th Joint Technical Symposium (JTS) was held in Paris betweenthe 19th and 22nd of January. This year 2000 the subject was "Image and Sound archiving and Access - the challenges of the 3rd Millennium".

JTS, from its onset 1983, has become the main international gathering for all specialists of the audio-visual, cinema and sound heritage.

The venue was the Auditorium of the Institute du Monde Arab which is situated by the river Seine.

More than 300 participants from all over the world attended this JTS Conference and 40 speakers from different countries were invited to lecture.

First on the programme were visits to Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), IRCAM, Service des Archives du film de Bois d'Arcy and ECPA. Those of us who chose BnF had four interesting hours when we got informed about the history of the library and a presentation of its collections and different buildings with their own specific features and functions.

The visit was worked out thoroughly and well done except for some of the parts were the interpreters did not succeed to reach non frenchspeaking participants.

The conference programme began with presentations about restoration and preservation of the vinegar syndrom, storage conditions, techniques for monitoring the breakdown of film and sound materials, CD-R Media for example. The following days the subjects were standardization for information preservation, digital colorimetric processing of old movie pictures, digital migration, preserving data from space missions, standardisation of metadata and so on. As you can see this is only a selection of the programme from the three JTS days with so many speakers.

Among the really "hot" topics for audiovisual archivists at this seminar you find a lot of discussions on the decay of material and preservation - "Vinegar Syndrome" and "Management of Umatic cassettes at BBC" were only a couple of headings in this area.

Several issues concerning the chemical decay of acetate film were discussed at the symposium, in particular the so-called vinegar syndrome. This term refers to the chemical reaction that occurs to a varying extent in all acetate film and in the end destroys it, due to the formation of vinegar.

The speed of this process varies depending on the sort of film and the development process used, as well as storage methods etc. Magnetic sound on acetate base is also affected and causes, in fact, an enhancement of both the speed of the process as well as a wider spread. This is why it‚s important to store the picture and the sound separately and not in the same box. The boxes should be made out of an acid-free material and should also contain a molecular sieve, which adsorbs acid and delays the decay. Of course, one should never store film together with acid-containing paper (for example notes or reports) or with objects with an unknown chemical composition.

For finding out the aging condition of a film one has to take individual samples. You can use specially designed acid strips, which is placed together with the film for a certain time and then indicates a value on the scale of the strip.

One way of reducing the speed of the process radically is to let the film undergo special treatment at a professional laboratory and then store it freezed at an optimal temperature and humidity. There is, however, no way of totally getting rid of the vinegar problem.

Projects manager Adam Lee at the BBC was one of the speakers at the symposium. He reported the efforts made by the BBC in rescuing material recorded on old U-Matic tapes in 1982-1984. The tapes were copied to DVD with high resolution for jukebox use. For lending out to customers there were also copies made into the DVC format.

Copying old U-Matic tapes isn‚t always easy. One of the problems is the adhesive properties of the emulsion, i.e. it has a tendency to come off. This was one of the reasons for choosing to work with a manual copying process instead of an automatic one. With manual copying it was possible to stop the tape for cleaning or whatever.

Old U-Matic tapes are very sensitive and sometimes difficult to restore. A tape which won‚t work in one player may work just fine with another. In checking out the "playability" of the tapes on several different players, it became clear that the Sony BVU 800 was a very good player for the project. An external TBC and framestore with one frame delay was also used for stability.

As the future most certainly will bring about better techniques for restoring old analogous tapes, all the original tapes were saved.

Jim Lindner The last speaker before the Conclusion gave a lively performance and some thoughtful aspects on the future archive developments. His speech "Toward a mediaLESS archive" was a perfect final with a lot of laughs and philosophical highlights, like the problems archive people will have forty years from now to understand way we were interested in compression Clones and mirrors was words used to try to understand what future archiving will be like . At the end five gentlemen was placed on the stage playing with balls to illustrate future networking and storage.

Coming to a certain conclusion you can clearly see that the interest by the different organisations is today more similar than earlier. No matter of which media is discussed the question at issue is important for all.

A successfull event is ver much dependent on what might be called "the seminar logistics". The organisation concerning practical details like coffee breaks, water etc was unsatisfying. To be able to assimiliate the very interesting presentations in such a big hall with some hundereds of people it is importat to have supply of water for example. However, the evening reception at the top of the Institut du Monde Arabe was enjoyible. To mention especially the view were you had a fantastic scenery of the Tour Eiffel enlightened, the Notre Dame and the river Seine with all the boats passing then you realise that Paris is fantastic at any time of the year.

Personal impressions of the JTS

We asked Branko Bubenik, Head of Archive, Kroatia, Chairperson of the FIAT/IFTA Training Commission: What is your general impression of the JTS Conference?

- In fact I am not satisfied with JTS programme in Paris as there were too much formulas and philosophizing upon the eternal JTS subject "Vinegar syndrom". Professional training of AV archivists and technicians was only mentioned. About the main current archive medium - Betacam SP cassette, not a single word! To my opinion Mr. Denis Frambourt, our representative in JTS organizing committee, should have had to make better consultation before of the FIAT/IFTA EC members, about the JTS programme.

Q: The most important for you to bring home to your archive?

- I have brought home the anxiety for TV archivists from Middle East and South-East Europe, who were not present at JTS meeting in Paris because of (most probable) financial reasons. From these three great European regions only the representative of Slovenia,Greece and Croatia were present.

- On the next EC meeting in London I would propose that FIAT/IFTA give in donation to all members of our organisation who were not in Paris, a CD-ROM with lectures included, as the organiser promised to send it to all members of the seminar.

Jim Lindner - President, VidiPax, New York and coopted member of the FIAT/IFTA EC: What is your general impression of the JTS Conference?

- At JTS we were all allowed to examine the issues of archival preservation from many different perspectives!"

Päivi Uusimaa, Televison Archive at YLE, Finland, has been working with documentation, research and sales for eleven years. Right now also participating in a project on digitizing two-inch tapes: What is your immediate impression of the JTS?

- The conference was really interesting. I was afraid that the program would be to technical but it was not. Some of the presentations with chemical formula were too technical. - I liked the atmosphere and the fact that we all are "the administrators of the archives and not the guards of a cementary

- I think it also was useful to listen to such a broad field of subjects. Sometimes I felt that it had been easier to assimiliate the audiosubjects if they had been presentated separately but on the whole I think the program was well composed. The developement of all archives, whether they are radio-, television- or filmarchives, is for the benefit to all of us.

Stig Lennart Molneryd, Technical Department Manager, ALB, Sweden:

- This year's Joint Technical Symposium meeting in Paris contained many interesting papers. We have so many vitally important subjects to deal with in only a few days. In my opinion the result was that the lectures were too many and too short, and hence the information too compressed.

- As most of the papers and presentations show, we are dealing with different and complex matters concerning archive material all over the world. It became evident that the preservation problems don't diminish because of digitation of the material. We know that the direction is towards digitation, an automation with robots, and a never-ending migration.

- We have just seen the start of a world wide distribution of digital sound, moving images, multimedia, and the soon coming E-movies in cinemas. All this digital information has to be stored on a UPF, Universal Preservation Format and it is a future challenge to create such a system. Will it ever be possible to get a future proof archival format as long as the main incentive for the manufacturers of equipment and storage media rather is commercial competition than development of proof archival systems?

Agneta Forsström, Eva-Lis Green, Gert Landewall/SVT