Ethnographic Video for Instruction and Analysis (EVIA) Digital Archive (review)

This database of ethnographic video is not in the same category as traditional commercial electronic resources, and should probably not be reviewed in the same manner—where the range and depth of its content, and the ease of use, are balanced against price in order to help librarians make decisions on purchasing. Initiated through conversations between ethnomusicologists Ruth Stone of Indiana University and Lester Monts of the University of Michi gan on the need to preserve video recordings of their fieldwork in Africa, the EVIA Digital Archive project has sought to be much more than a mere presentation of searchable content, and its founders have attempted to create a structure where issues of preservation, documentation, and effective teaching tools are the main subjects rather than the means to an end.

With this in mind, it should be cautioned that the database's content so far is fairly modest, considering the enormous body of ethnographic video that exists and needs preservation. The specific reasons for the slow growth in content will be examined below, but one should bear in mind that the project was begun as a means to solicit video fieldwork from researchers and instruct them on the proper ways of digitizing and documenting their recordings, with the resulting digital archive serving as a sustainable body of teaching material—a kind of "if we build it they will come" model, rather than one that presents an already existing collection of material to the world.

The content, as of this writing, consists of nine "collections"—from Brazil, China, Ivory Coast, Macedonia, Malawi, Mexico, Tanzania (two collections), and the United States—each contributed by one fieldworker. The "Collections" link from the EVIA home page describes a total of forty-six collections, which means there are thirty-seven still in production. These additional collections expand the geographic scope to the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and Russia, and several of them treat Jewish and African-American cultures in diaspora. In the course of the project, the "E" in EVIA has changed from "ethnomusicological" to "ethnographic"—clearly reflecting a desire to expand the scope of the material, despite the project's origins in the ethnomusicological community. While the contributors appear to be equally divided among ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, and folklorists, the overwhelming majority of the collections document performance-related events—music, dance, ritual, and in a couple of cases, storytelling.

At the moment access to EVIA is offered for free "through selected academic institutions, groups, and by individual permission," according to its "Access to the Archive" page. From my own experience, I know that individual permissions have been granted at least to the entire membership of the Society for Ethnomusicology, and quite a few academic institutions have been given access, generally where the curriculum includes world music survey courses and courses that include discussions of ethnographic fieldwork. The project received funding from the Mellon Foundation, and the current phase, which began in 2009, attempts to move away from this funding and establish a sustainable service with income generated by subscriptions and "additional grant support." All of this information is available from EVIA's home page, along with abundant detail describing the collections, digital preservation, cataloging and documentation, scholarly research, pedagogical applications, intellectual property and ethics, and the software tools developed in the project.

While clearly EVIA is designed as much for a community of contributors as for its "end users"—scholars, teachers, and students who would use the fieldwork of others for their own purposes—it would not be an exaggeration to suggest that, thus far in the life of the project, it has served the former group better than the latter. An attempt to solicit feedback from the ethnomusicological community for...