This guide provides practical steps for managing, storing, sharing, and preserving your videos. Developed by the WITNESS Media Archive to manage its collection of sensitive human rights audiovisual materials, it assists filmers and journalists maintain their videos so that they stay intact, authentic, and accessible.A number of different standards and schemas are utilized, particularly PBCore.
This cataloging manual makes a valuable contribution to the moving image archive community. It specifically addresses the moving image archive as it exists today: one with analogue, digitized and digital born materials of all types – from finished productions to project based media files to raw camera footage, to ancillary materials (scripts, logs etc), etc. Its general introduction to moving image cataloging (part 1) includes all the relevant issues; and its many examples, explicit metadata attribute definitions, mapping to PBCore 2.0 elements and controlled vocabulary are applicable in any moving image archive context. In addition, it offers a good methodology for intellectually managing the relationships between material produced during different production stages – from project inception through final production. Because the WITNESS archive holds material of a sensitive and personal nature, its examples are helpful for other archives with this type of material. Although it serves as an internal handbook to a specific collection management software in use by the WITNESS archive (with screenshots of the software etc.), this does not detract from its broader applicability.