Editor's Forward

As I write these lines in September 2004, a new school year is beginning. For budding moving image media archivists there are now three professional moving image archives training programs to choose from in this country. The MIAS program at UCLA just graduated its first class of students in June. During the academic year 2004–2005 New York University will send its first MAs in film archiving out into the world. Finally, as I write this, some students at George Eastman House's Selznick School are matriculating into an academic degree–granting masters program through the University of Rochester. Moving archives training programs are also expanding rapidly in Europe: the oldest, East Anglia, has now been joined by Amsterdam and Potsdam (see The Moving Image 4, no. 2).

By establishing formal programs in archival training, the field has taken another giant step toward professionalization. While the autodidactic approach characterized training in the field until quite recently, it has long been understood within AMIA that creating a generation of professionally trained moving image archivists was part and parcel to the establishment of standards in the field, as well as to research and development to keep those standards up to date. Most individuals presently working in moving image archiving and preservation have received on-the-job training and little else. Indeed, the major impetus for the annual AMIA conference was the real need for training, as well as for the exchange of ideas about archival methodologies and practices. It was either the first or second official AMIA conference in 1991, where workshops were first instituted, at which more experienced colleagues taught archiving basics to novices and younger colleagues. So, for the field, the institution of moving image archives training programs is yet another sign of the profession's maturity.

But where are the standards to come from? We have to remember that, despite decades of work, moving image archival practice is at present still based on little more than an informal set of anecdotally communicated "recommendations." Few standards have been theorized or codified; even fewer practices have been formalized in a program of "best practices." Most of what we call archival ethics and theory has been borrowed from other fields, such as library and information sciences and museum curatorship. The field itself is producing literature through research projects at the Image Permanence Institute and other privately funded chemical and digital laboratories. But it will also be the job of the academic moving image training programs to contribute to this research. By training students in the profession, they will of necessity create knowledge that can be integrated into our overall professional discourse on standards and practices. By questioning informally established procedures, students force both working professionals and professors to explicate and rationalize their current use, resulting in stronger arguments for their utilization or, in some cases, the realization that a given proce-dure may indeed be less than effective. Documenting these types of discussions in protocols, student papers, and formal academic articles, as a part of the process of archival training at the university level, will lead to a greater degree of theorization than is presently common in the field. In other words, research must go hand in hand with vocational training, simply because the field is too young to have an established body of knowledge.

And in this context, AMIA's founding of an academic journal, The Moving Image, was another important leap into professionalization. The journal is one of the formalized devices by which a field establishes methodologies, theorizes practices, and discusses courses of action for the future. But the journal must succeed as a forum, not only for established voices in the field but for students and younger members, offering them a place to publish, often for the first time, the findings of their work. I'm gratified that virtually every issue of this journal has included essays by students from UCLA, East Anglia, and elsewhere, who have contributed the results of their moving image archival research.

Just last week, a group of MIAS students, freshly matriculated at UCLA, stopped by my museum to take a tour...