National Video Archive of Performance

The difference is that those were specifically-filmed recordings that were designed to work as pieces of entertainment, to mimic the theatrical experience as much as possible. Archive recordings are not - they’re simply a record of what the production did, like the prompt script is. They’re often very poor quality - a single fixed camera with poor resolution, sound caught from one mic which is difficult to make out, jumps and skips in the recording, etc.

I don't think we can argue that the various organizations involved should be making archive recordings available to the wider public and then argue that the only people who are going to be using it are the comparatively tiny number of people studying drama, or extreme theatre geeks. It's too expensive an exercise to go through if the audience is that tiny, and the quality is a concern if it's not.

It would be much cheaper for there just to be a travel grant scheme and extended opening hours, if the audience is that small!

People assume that 'online' = cheap, but this would not be a cheap project - it would take hundreds of hours to work out what agreements were needed, and negotiate them, let alone sorting out the actual hosting and streaming. You can't just put things up on Youtube if you need to reassure the creatives involved that their work won't be judged on the quality of the recording - or worse, turned into gifs that are used to troll them on social media.

It would certainly be convenient for the viewer, yes. I think you are underestimating the work and the cost involved in setting it up, though.

In order to create a system that the people whose agreement they need would be happy with, they would have to spend quite a bit of money on it. The cheap-as-chips options wouldn’t be suitable. So unless someone comes along and donates a chunk of money, or there’s a way it can be linked to a revenue-generating product to fund it, it’s not going to happen.


Edit: To give a bit more of an example - the recording I watched in NYPL was of a Cheek By Jowl touring production recorded at Brooklyn Academy of Music. So the recording was deposited in the NYPL archive but still owned by BAM. Obviously they needed Cheek By Jowl’s agreement to make the recording. In order to view it, I had to contact the NYPL and they then had to send a request to BAM to be approved before they could book in an appointment for me. I then had to fill in a form on the day to state why I wanted to view the recording - I was told that ‘research’ was too vague and that I needed to add more detail, so presumably someone somewhere cares enough to check! That process must be written into the contracts somewhere - either the agreement with one of the unions or the theatre company or the venue required it.


For the V&A, they are a lot more open to the public, but you still have to register for a reader card and turn up with ID. Once there Obviously you're not allowed to take any recording equipment in. How can an online access system verify who is accessing it and where they are accessing it from? How can it ensure that the user doesn’t copy the recording?



Answering those questions takes time and money. I don’t think people quite realise how hard it is - the publishing industry is struggling to sort out easy off-campus access to resources via a single sign-on still, to try and combat piracy - at the moment lots of people find it easier to pirate content they have paid access to when they’re off campus because logging in via their institution portal is a pain - and we’ve been publishing our content online for a couple of decades!

I have to stand up in defence of the archives, who I've worked with a fair bit professionally. The idea seems to have been gotten here that they're trying to "keep" these recordings (and other information) from people. Quite the opposite!

Both V&A and NT archive are open to the public. Anyone can go in and watch them or read materials. They aren't open 24/7 because they're working archives, on mostly a shoestring budget. Nobody is making a profit, and their primary aim is to preserve these records for historical and scholarly purposes. But they are still AVAILABLE TO THE PUBLIC.

As much as it would be nice for more people to see them, anyone who wants to can. Yes, obviously being physically near them helps, but the NT archive is...at the NT there's not much they can do about that without being ridiculous about it.

I'm not quite sure what more people want?

I feel like I’ve spent several posts explaining why they don’t just make it available online. It’s not because they’re being mean or stingy or they *want* to make it awkward, it’s because it’s a lot more complicated to do than you think it is.

For example, it’s not the case that all archive recordings are in a digital format - some of them are still on video tape!

The first part of that has already been explained multiple times and asking over and over again isn't going to magically change the answer to one you want to hear.

The second part is because it's expensive. It takes a lot of time to transfer data between media and that requires money to pay people for that time. In addition, digital formats are not the solution you think they are. Standards change over time, and there are already many old data archives that can no longer be read because there's no physical hardware to read them on and no software that understands the format. Even where the hardware and software still exists the media itself deteriorates over time: most digital archives are stored on tape that decomposes just as quickly as videotape (and is harder to read when it does because the data density is higher), and optical and magnetic discs also have limited lifespans. The advantage of digital formats is that creating duplicate copies is faster than duplicating analogue data, but you need to set aside time and money to make copies of everything every few years to maintain the integrity of the archive.

Copyright.

It’s the right to make copies of something.

The archives don’t have it. They have a physical recording they are allowed to show to people.

This is why digitising the archives would mean going back through all the contracts that were made when the recordings were handed over, checking who the rights holders they need permission from are, and then approaching and negotiating with them for permission to make a digital copy and distribute it online.

The key to the 19th Century documents that are being made available online is that they are out of copyright.

I might add that I'm coming at this from the perspective of someone who had mobility issues for many years and for whom the internet has been a godsend.

I've looked up some info on the collections and it seems some archive bodies are trying to digitise material and get it out to a wider audience - I'm hoping that means online or more local hubs. 

You clearly don't understand copyright and permission issues at all or you wouldn't just be waving them away as if they're not the major reason why things just can't be done.

A publicly-funded archive can't just go around breaking copyright law because it would be convenient for you, the way an individual with a youtube/file sharing account can.

The BBC can digitise their archives because they own the copyright to them. You can digitise archives that are out of copyright. You can create products to sell to other libraries or institutions out of digitised archive material (hey, check out what Adam Matthews and The Globe are launching next year: www.researchinformation.info/news/adam-matthews-shakespeare-collaboration) if you own or license copyright to it from the owners (who will expect a royalty fee back from sales, obviously).

But if someone has given you a recording for your archive on the basis that it's used for research purposes only, and not for any commercial uses, in a protected environment where users cannot make copies of it, and not granted you the copyright on the recording, you can't do any of that.

Because the NT owns the copyright. Because providing those recording to schools was part of the contract that everyone who was involved in the production signed. Because the unions negotiated extra compensation for everyone who worked on the production to compensate for their work being recorded and re-used.

None of that was done with archive recordings because it wasn't technically possible - it wasn't event conceived of - at the time they were made.

Many theatre practitioners disagree with you on the *should* part, because they feel that theatre *should* be a live experience, not a recorded one, since the recorded one is always a second-best experience (even when it's the best possible version of that second-best experience).

You are much more likely to see paper records  from archives digitised that performance recordings, and even in the future not every theatre practitioner is going to want to record their performances for general consumption. We'll see more of it, yes, but I think they'll still want to keep more control over broadcast than your ideal would be.