Adrian Salas

American Archives and Manuscripts

Fall 2014

Conceptualizing the Emerging Digital Moving Image Archive

In the field of Moving Image Archiving evolving technology has necessitated a reconceptualization of the practices that archivists and collection stewards must utilize to maintain
assets in their care. Where collections were once almost purely physical aggregations of
materials such as various formats of film or video cassettes, the emergence and eventual
domination of digital technologies has taken over as the primary modes of production,
distribution and storage. Everything from preservation to access needs to be reconsidered in light
of the changing needs and abilities of the emerging digital work spaces that must be navigated
and codified into the new work-flows and best practices for the moving image archive field.
The Moving Image is the official publication of the Association of Moving Image
Archivists (AMIA). The journals founding in spring of 2001 coincided with the beginnings of
the increasingly rapid shift from analog to digital in the everyday work place of the archivist.
This has not always been a smooth transition as even 13 years later there are still unsettled
debates among practitioners in the moving image field about everything from aesthetic values to
practical preservation questions about the comparative merits of analog and digital mediums.
This paper will trace the conceptualization of the digital moving image archive by looking at
articles submitted by differing practitioners that are interspersed throughout the run of The
Moving Image up to the present day. The writers in the journal are not solely comprised of audio
visual (AV) archivists, and the articles examined come from a very broad spectrum of
information custodians grappling with the shifts in practice that digitals ascendance has
necessitated. The spread of the articles writers career-wise and time wise expose points of
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divergence on where priorities are placed in conceptualizing the new digital archives, and also a
common points of concern, such as the logistics of preservation of information for the long term.
Writing in 2001 in the Moving Images 2nd ever issue is moving image archivist and
digital information specialist Howard Besser.1 Having worked at UCLA in the school of
Information Studies2, before leaving to found the Moving Image Archiving & Preservation
Program (MIAP) at New York University in 2004, Besser was in a unique position to intimately
observe the workings of a traditional moving image archive (the UCLA Film & Television
Archive). Writing at the forefront of the major digital paradigm shifts, Bessers statements
retrospectively have a bit of an aura of the canary in the mine:
The advent of digital technology is leading to widespread changes in moving image
production. These changes are reverberating through all aspects of moving images- from
distribution channels to user expectations. Though the time lines and extent of many of
these changes are overly inflated, these changes are still likely to force a dramatic shift in
the film preservation paradigm. (Besser, 40)
Besser sees the digital shifts occurring along all the stages of the moving image chain of
creation. Furthermore, he sees how these various steps in film production, distribution, and
storage are inter-related in their effects upon each other as the digital tide ramps up.

1 Besser, Howard. "Digital Preservation of Moving Image Material?" The Moving Image: The Journal of
the Association of Moving Image Archivists 1, no. 2 (Fall, 2001): 39-55. Accessed December 12, 2014.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/41167061 .

2 Howard Besser's Homepage. Accessed December 11, 2014. http://besser.tsoa.nyu.edu/howard/.

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A path is traced in the shift of materials in the archive, as Besser observes that digital
technologies of distribution such as DVDs and internet delivery have caused a new life for
ancillary assets that were once not of much concern to moving image archivists outside of the
need to perhaps preserve supplemental filmic materials.3 As technology advances change the
methods of presentation available to audiences, Besser argues that the original notion of an AV
archivist as the caretaker of singular physical artifacts, such as films, will not hold into the new
digital era of media archiving. What is needed instead is for the archivist to develop new
technology aligned skill sets to maintain mastery over the shifting makeup of the collections in
their care. As Besser states, moving image archivists who do not move quickly to widen their
areas of responsibility may soon find themselves marginalized and subordinated to digital asset
managers.4 Besser isnt articulating the obsolescence of the AV archivist, but rather the need for
the profession to recognize that the AV archive of the post-digital world will not be a static entity
operating on the old paradigm of the singular object centered archive. Based on my personal
experience in an archive, even though it is not a strictly AV one, Bessers assertions as to caring
for a collection of visual materials have so far borne out as true, seeing as at least rudimentary
digital proficiency is required to perform tasks such as tracing objects locations across a
collection.
It is Bessers assertion that [a]rchivists have well developed training and skills for
handling moving image materials, and these skills are seldom found in staff from other

3 Besser, 42-45.

4 Besser, 44.

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departments.5 In this instance he is specifically referencing the danger inherent in handing over
too many duties related to collection maintenance to others in an institution with technical
training, such as information technology (IT) staff, but no subject specialization directly related
to materials in an archives care. What one should remember is that digital maintenance and
preservation isnt supposed to be an us against them scenario where everyone sequesters
digital realms into private vanity projects, but that disparate areas should consult with each other
to develop solutions that best accomplish archival objectives. The archivist is still a distinct
profession, not one that has been superseded in purpose by digital content managers. That said,
Besser is making a case that the skill of digital content management is now one that archivists
need to have in their toolbox so as to move forward: [o]nce digital archivists have shifted their
conceptual framework to focus on preserving- serving disembodied masters, the question
remains of how to do that best.6 The assessment Besser made of the shifting paradigm under
which AV and moving image archivists is very clearly stated, and has seemed to play out much
like he has said for the most part. If there is any major deficiency in his writing, it is perhaps that
he didnt completely grasp how quickly the digital shift would end up occurring in archival
practice due to changing practices in digital distribution, but this seems to be a matter of
hindsight more than anything that affects the inevitable transformation of the field he sees
beginning to happen.
While Besser, is writing his article from a space of authority as an information science
practitioner familiar with the shifting technologies, practice, and the specialized activities of
5 Besser, 47

6 Besser, 51

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moving image archivists, a contemporaneous article from the Moving Image by Rudolf Frieling
approaches the digital shift from a different perspective. Appearing in the same issue as Bessers
article, Storage and Space: Notes on Collecting, Archiving, and Presenting Digital Moving
Image Works is Frielings report on the collection of video artworks he held responsibility over
as part of a media library at the Zentrum fr Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM). A shift in
focus is clear right away as the writer prefaces the entire article by stating, I am neither a trained
archivist nor a classic conservator of media, but rather a curator who, back in 1994, happened to
find himself responsible for a collection of video art works.7 Right away the difference in focus
is clear as Frielings concerns with the archive seem to be more in the realm of theory and
aesthetics than in practical application.
Frieling draws a distinction between the archives and collections. His definition of an
archive is of spaces that traditionally accomplish a political task by conserving documents,
regardless of current trends and interests at higher levels of authority.8 This definition implies
that Frieling envisions the archive as a dispassionate custodian of any kind of documents it
comes to acquire as part of the institutional purview and acquisition policy. The problem that this
philosophy of acquisition presents to the writer is that, it introduces more complication in the
work of the archivist because there is difficulty in deciding what selection criteria should be
implemented.9 The worry here is that due to the long term obligation of an archive to conserve
7 Frieling, Rudolf. "Storage and Space: Notes on Collecting, Archiving, and Presenting Digital Moving
Image." The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists 1, no. 2 (Fall,
2001): 146-52. Accessed December 10, 2014. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41167066.

8 Frieling, 146

9 Ibid.

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material, the emerging digital landscape will introduce many problems in how one can keep
objects that are completely electronically based viable going forward. In this concern, Frieling is
in concert with Besser. This is after all a looming concern to the future of an archive, seeing as a
lack of a sound digital preservation policy could essentially lead to a suppressed archive of
obsolete or decayed electronic records as surely as a fire could render a paper based archive
inaccessible.
Frieling goes on to further elaborate his conception of a collection as being different
from the general definition of an archive, in that whether private or state owned, [a collection]
conveys the idea of having a specific focus.10 He conceptualizes a collections long term fate as
belonging more to the discretion of curators rather than an archives obligation of dispassionate
long term maintenance for all materials that they take in. Frieling sees benefit in the ability to
essentially weed collections down according to the desires of its caretakers and make managing
the overwhelming wave of digital materials that are being generated much easier to deal with.
There is issue to be taken with the collection versus archive distinction he is drawing. Frieling
seems to be pushing the concept that a collection is essentially the same as an archive, but with
somehow more curatorial input involved due to the aforementioned specific focus he postulates
is involved in building a collection. This parsing of terms rings hollow. What Frieling seems to
want to articulate is that he finds in the concept of collection an increase of editorial oversight
by curators in making choices as to what are desirable materials to amass. This greater freedom
of choice almost seems to be based upon assigning attributes to terms of his own accord. An

10 Ibid.

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archives collecting focus can be just as wide or narrow as what is outlined in its acquisition
policy and institutional mission.
The idea of an archive being given more control over what it takes into its charge is not
without precedent though, as this is essentially the concept of archival appraisal in practice.
Frielings concept of the non-selective archive is based entirely on a Jenkinsonian model in
which Terry Cook describes: The focus was on collecting... documentary residues, without
selection, and developing methods and procedures to describe them intellectually, in context, and
maintain them physically, in archives, in order to ensure their trustworthiness as evidence.11 The
concept of an archive was that of a collection that took in everything that it came across, as the
items all held essential truths that were in some way related to whatever was an archives subject
at hand. Cook goes on to describe how later on the Schellenberg model of archival theory took
hold, in which archivists became subject specialists trained academically who no longer
passively accepted all materials as key, but began exercising discretion by studying their subjects
and making active decisions on the values objects held that would make them of service as an
integral addition to an archive, or conversely the freedom to dispose of records that held no
value. Frieling seems to be striving for archival practices that are along the lines of the
Schellenberg model, but he articulates this using terminology of his own devising.
To bring the subject back the point of the digital archive, Frieling seems to primarily be
interested in how applying appraisal would be of greatest service to collection managers as this
would allow the deluge of digital works that must be conserved and maintained to be brought
into practical numbers. This concern about how to best establish a workable solution for digital
11 Cook, Terry. We Are What We Keep; We Keep What We Are: Archival Appraisal Past, Present and
Future. Journal of the Society of Archivists 32, no. 2 (2011): 173-189. Accessed December 13, 2014.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00379816.2011.619688. 176.

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preservation is one that Frieling shares with Howard Besser. Even as far back as 2001, these two
practitioners in the realm of moving image archiving, despite coming from different areas of
expertise, recognized that even though digital held much promise, it was not a magic bullet
solution to concerns such as maintenance and preservation, as these are area that would still
require ongoing labor in some form to accomplish.
Frielings article goes on to largely detail his observations of the media center he works in
and its theoretical implications on access to moving images. His musings and observations on the
role of art in the ongoing digital paradigm shift signal a distinct change from Besser and his
focus on practical impacts on the moving image and archival fields. Frieling does make one more
observation though that is somewhat provocative if not necessarily sounding like it is the best
reasoned idea: Collections and archives don't have to bring all their material on-line. On the
contrary, we could benefit enormously from productive search engines, content-oriented portals,
contextual friction, interface research, and artistic intervention.12 Or more succinctly put, things
in archives should be easier to find and make use of. On the surface, the statement makes sense
in that increase of usability is always desirable in any archive that is concerned with more than
simply just long term preservation. The problems that arise from the statement come from the
assumption that collections dont have to bring all their material on-line. Strictly speaking, an
archive or collection doesnt need to bring any materials online, but doing so ignores the research
and access realities that have taken hold. While materials in an archive dont need to be
necessarily digitized they do need to be at least represented accurately and sufficiently in the
electronic record. With the move away from paper record keeping, and the vulnerability of
collections to obscurity through the loss of institutional knowledge as archival staffers leave,
12 Frieling, 151

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electronic catalogs are the new register of note. All the increased archival interaction that
Frieling proposes becomes essentially moot if chunks of collections become essentially hidden
through lack of discoverable representation.
Another side to the argument about how to handle the large influx of digital material, or
large backlogs of material needing processing and arrangement in general, is the controversial
More Product, Less Process (MPLP) approach that has been articulated in archival description
by Greene and Meisnerr.13 Deviating from Freilings suggestion that more effort should be made
to make richer use of smaller parts of archives, MPLP instead operates under the premise of
[w]hat is the least we can do to get the job done in a way that is adequate to user needs, now
and in the future?14 Contrary to the assumption that one might make that this is the slackers
manifesto, MPLP is actually a suggested re -conceptualization of archival processing in which
granularity of detail is sacrificed in order for archivists to work through larger amounts of
material and tame backlogs. The argument being made, is that if archivists can limit their time
spent in archival arrangement and description of materials in their trust, they will eventually
make more collections accessible to the communities their archives serve by taking a rapid fire
approach to description and processing. There is merit to this line of reasoning since pushing a
collection out to the light of day, as it were, will improve the chances it will get into more hands
of people who will make use of the knowledge contained within.

13 Greene, Mark A., and Dennis Meissner. "More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archival
Processing." American Archivist 68, no. 2 (2007): 208-63. Accessed December 13, 2014.
http://archivists.metapress.com/content/c741823776k65863/.

14 Greene and Meissner, 240

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On the other end of the spectrum of the processing question, thinning data may have
other consequences that are not apparent at the moment, but could manifest in records too sparse
to be of much use in the future. Howard Besser actually sees the tide turning towards the need
for records with even finer detail:
As we have seen with both the Web and DVDs, there is increasing demand to view material
in fragments. This type of fragmented use is a perfect complement to a postmodern era,
where mass cultural elements are repeatedly recontextualized. Promotional units within a
studio, advertisers, production companies, and end users all periodically request to see
and/or use a particular clip. This implies an increasing need for access at lower levels of
granularity than a completed work. (Besser, 44)
A completed work in the moving image archive, which once could be the equivalent of an asset
on the item level, may need to be rethought instead as more akin to something on the folder or
box level. Besser illustrates that patterns of consumption for moving images have shifted with
the emergence of more flexible consumer platforms that can easily allow consumers to make use
of formerly esoteric materials, and that these shifts in patterns of use will eventually come down
into the archive. The fragmented use he references, in which materials are valued for their
utility as clips or ancillary functions such as advertising or re-use in other projects, means that
now in the digital archive environment people need to be able to be able to find and make sense
of assets that were formerly only miscellany generated in production but with no real utility in
the shadow of the completed work of a completed reel of film or videocassette. As a lot of
moving image materials are moving into digital asset management systems (DAMS), tying
completed films together with all their attendant metadata, supplementary outtakes, alternate

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footage, stills, and printed materials such as scripts and press are now possible within a robust
system.
DAMS have become valuable as they tie together with and allow navigation within
digital repositories that have become the virtual equivalent of the vault and shelf space of the
classic archive. Carl Fleischhauer, writing in the pages of The Moving Image a couple of years
later in 2003, brings yet another practitioners perspective to the digital challenge as he is a digital
librarian for the Library of Congress. He defines the digital library as organized entities, public
and private, that exist to collect, provide access to, and especially preserve content in digital
form.15 The digital library is different from an archive in that it is focused solely on digital
formats and delivery. Although many archives, AV archives included, may make a case for
digital access, the archivists who work with collection still have to straddle both a physical and
electronic world. Even with the push towards digital workflows and format shifting, there is still
years of worth of legacy materials such as films, books, and paper records that have accumulated
and will be in backlog for a long time to come. Also, because of uncertainty in the long term
viability of digital preservation and concerns about the accuracy of digital reformatting of
materials many archives would rightfully be loath to de-accession their physical holdings. Digital
librarians concentrate solely on the virtual work-spaces for research that are now available
thanks to the advance of internet speeds and technology.
As Fleischhauer sees it, it is the vault that is front and center for digital library
specialists; we associate the term preservation with what we call the digital repository. Our
focus is as much concerned with keeping as with making.16 The digital librarians are more
15 Fleischhauer, Carl. "Looking at Preservation from the Digital Library Perspective." The Moving Image
3.2 (2003): 96-100. Project MUSE. University of Minnesota Press. Web. 14 Dec. 2014. 96.

16 Fleischhauer, 97.

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content agnostic than archivists in their duties. The duties the digital librarians perform are
analogous to those carried to vault managers and reading room staff in the physical archive. They
take care of the environment (the digital repository) that the digital data created by others such as
archivists, preservation staff, and others content producers in an institution. To create some
context for the digital library, Fleischhauer references the fact that many digital librarians have
adopted the Open Archival Information Systems (OAIS) reference model that was developed as
a conceptual structure for digital archival practices with its five modules of storage, data
management, administration, access, and ingest.17 These five modules are then fed by several
different varieties of data packages with differing purposes: submission information packages,
archival information packages, and dissemination information packages. It is within these
packages that the data and metadata lives that digital librarians are ultimately responsible for
maintaining. The challenge of maintaining data for the long term is where a through-line is
apparent between the concerns of all the parties so far mentioned with a vested interest in digital
archiving. Whether it is archivists, curators, or digital librarians the early 21st century presented a
land of shifting landscapes in the realm of digital information maintenance. All parties so far
mentioned have zeroed in on the need to develop standards that will ensure that the digital
information that is being created will be able to last in the long term.
Fleischhauer identifies two areas that weigh heavily on the ability to maintain data for the
long term: maintaining and refreshing the bits and coping with interpretability.18 Besser

17 Fleischhauer, 97-98.

18 Fleischhauer, 98.

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identifies the exact same areas of concern in his article and also outlines what he calls the
translation problem.19 Maintaining bits is the process of storing and periodically migrating
digital information forward to new physical storage formats such as LTO tapes, RAID drives,
and even individual hard drives. This process is resource intensive but straightforward
conceptually as it is basically the process of ensuring the bit-stream which comprises a digital
object is conserved and held stable so that the digital item continues to exist in an original,
uncorrupted form. Data stability is very important to maintain, because pristine files form the
basis of the master assets that Besser postulates will be the new keystones for AV archivists to
maintain and use to prepare derivative works from, as physical copies like reels of film fall by
wayside. Interpretability, coupled with the translation issues, represents a much more unsettled
and complex set of issues to tackle by everyone from archivists to those who build and support
information systems. While taking measures to maintain data are important in preservation,
interpretability is concerned with the ability for systems to read and utilize the information that is
saved. The older data becomes, the harder it will become to find information systems that can
natively read and handle files, similar to how format obsolescence works with physical mediums.
The concern is that even though information can be saved, it may end up being for all intent and
purposes inaccessible. Besser and Fleischhauer both invest hope that software standards will
evolve that take long term uses of data into account so that long term viability will be baked into
the coding that makes up digital objects in repositories.20 Otherwise, reliance on an
amalgamation of measures such as emulation and continuous migration of software to updated
19 Besser 45-48.

20 Besser ,51-52 and Fleischhauer, 98.

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file formats is what will be needed to make continued use of items in the digital archive well into
the future.
Bringing the practice of digital film archiving to the present an article from 2013 in the
Moving Image traces the history of the practice of moving image archiving through a study of the
preservation efforts for a collection of film clippings known as the David Turconi Project.21
Viewing the state of preservation efforts, both analog and digital, form a position of several
years of remove, the article draws out some interesting areas of commonality with the articles on
digital preservation written much earlier on in the 2000s. The Turconi Project is based on
preserving a collection of film frame clippings that Italian film historian Davide Turconi
assembled from a collection of around 1,540 deteriorating silent films assembled by Josef Joye
in the early 1900s. As many of the films were in advanced states of deterioration, and with no
feasible options for preservation open to him, Turconi decided to take clippings from the rapidly
self-destructing nitrate reels, to preserve a record of some sort of these works before the
deterioration became complete. The eventual collection of 23,491 clippings he assembled in the
1970s eventually was preserved and digitized by the George Eastman House. One of the most
interesting observations the authors make validates Bessers assertion of the growth of
fragmented viewing but in an un-expected way. While, many of the Joye films were eventually
preserved and made available for programming and study, it is the Turconi clippings that may
have found greater circulation. As the film clippings required no additional equipment to study,
and can be taken in in their entirety much quicker, they have found much use as reference for
scholars, historians, and researchers. As the authors state, one could argue that the frames are
21 Alicia, Fletcher, and Joshua Yumibe. "From Nitrate to Digital Archive: The Davide Turconi Project."
The Moving Image 13, no. 1 (2013): 1-32. Accessed December 11, 2014.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mov/summary/v013/13.1.fletcher.html.

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more accessible than their parent films precisely because they are fragments, even as one loses
the moving image with these photograms.22 The digitization of all these clips will only push that
further as they have been added to accessible websites which will allow study by those even
further afield. Although, the authors have reserved the same caveat that all the writings on digital
preservation have noted which is Certainly the hard drives on which they now reside will wear
out decades before the nitrate originals fade, meaning that the data will have to be migrated
routinely, which is the archival future of the digital image.23 Again and again we see all
practitioners of electronic data preservation and curation push that digital reformatting and
storage is not a magic bullet approach to saving material, but rather a labor intensive process
despite the ease of reproduction and access that it promotes.
Writing in 2013, Fletcher, who has training in preservation and collections management,
and Yumibe, a film studies scholar, also refine Frielings idea of what the mass of digital
information that is increasingly available to us now means: [k]nowledge does not arise
automatically from open access; rather, with the mass of information now available in digital
collections, it is more vital than ever for increased curatorial involvement and guidance in
shaping the pathways that lead to the production of knowledge within our digital archives.24 The
information flood needs some kind of support structure in place to help those who will be taking
advantage of all the new resources to navigate across the digital archive landscape. This also reenforces Bessers claim that the digital shift in archives will still necessitate knowledgeable
22 Fletcher and Yumibe, 15.

23 Ibid.

24 Fletcher and Yumibe, 16.

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archivists (and digital librarians), and not just technicians to reformat materials into digital
proxies.
The shift of moving images to the digital world was one that has caused impacts that are
still being felt even after many years. Whether focused on preservation, access, or aesthetics all
the writers examined do acknowledge that the world of cinema will necessitate new skills and
paradigms. Fletcher and Yumibe summarize: Indeed, one of the provocations of the digital
fracture point that we face now is that it allows us to approach again the fundamental political,
aesthetic, and historical questions of the cinematic medium.25 At the heart of the digital
transition, all these aforementioned concerns really do force a reconsideration of fundamental
questions to properly situate where archival practice will lie in dealing with new cinematic
realities.

Works Cited
Howard Besser's Homepage. Accessed December 11, 2014. http://besser.tsoa.nyu.edu/howard/.

25 Fletcher and Yumibe, 26.

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Alicia, Fletcher, and Yumibe Joshua. "From Nitrate to Digital Archive: The Davide Turconi
Project." The Moving Image 13, no. 1 (2013): 1-32. Accessed December 11, 2014.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mov/summary/v013/13.1.fletcher.html.

Besser, Howard. "Digital Preservation of Moving Image Material?" The Moving Image: The
Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists 1, no. 2 (2001): 39-55. Accessed
December 12, 2014. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41167061 .

Fleischhauer, Carl. "Looking at Preservation From the Digital Library Perspective." The Moving
Image 3, no. 2 (2003): 96-100. Accessed December 14, 2014.

Frieling, Rudolf. "Storage and Space: Notes on Collecting, Archiving, and Presenting Digital
Moving Image." The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image
Archivists

1,

no.

(2001):

146-52.

Accessed

December

10,

2014.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/41167066.

Greene, Mark A., and Dennis Meissner. "More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional
Archival Processing." American Archivist 68, no. 2 (2007): 208-63. Accessed December 13,
2014. http://archivists.metapress.com/content/c741823776k65863/.

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