Image archiving preserves living history, not just film

10/23/09Image archiving might invoke an image of "dusty rooms and collecting stuff," but it really is not as boring as it might sound, according to Jan-Christopher Horak, who spoke Friday morning at Emerson College about his career in image archiving.

Horak has had a long career in the field, and worked with organizations such as the George Eastman House, Universal Studios, and the Hollywood Entertainment Museum as an archivist and curator.

Horak said that archiving was something that too many people took for granted. He addressed the reality that many films and other visual media that we assume to be preserved in fact have been lost over the years.

"The notion that everything has been saved [and is] available on Netflix is not true," Horak said. He went on to say that 95 percent of silent films were lost, along with "a lot of material from the last few decades."

However, while much material has been lost, archivists from different programs around the country and world have saved a large amount of different genres of media.

But an archivist's job does not end with collecting. Archivists need to collect, catalogue, and then determine how to preserve what it is they have, Horak said, and, in the case of digital media, actually preserve the software as well.

After all, Horak said, it is much easier to store something that is physical - such as 35mm film, or any different film formats that have been used in the past, instead of something that only exists in cyberspace.

In reality, the ease of capturing images digitally is not going to translate as easily into preservation. In order to truly preserve digital media, Horak said, it has to be first transferred to a more permanent medium, which costs funding that many archives do not have.

And even once something had been placed into the archive, Horak said it did not guarantee that it was safe. "Material can just disappear," he said.

Even though much material has been lost, this is not supposed to discourage anyone from entering the field of archiving.

Horak said that archivists were becoming both historians and distributors, by helping to preserve living pieces of moving history.