Framers of the Kept: Against the Grain Appraisal of Ephemeral Moving Images

Introduction

In the archival profession, appraisal is defined as the intellectual activity of assessing the permanent or continuing archival value of records. As distinguished from monetary appraisal, which is concerned with assessing a current market value for items or collections,¹ archival appraisal is an ongoing evaluative process—a combination of theory, strategy, and methodology that guides the selection of records for acquisition, retention, and preservation. Therefore, archival appraisal is the archivist's most crucial social responsibility. Terry Cook writes:

As we archivists appraise records, we are doing nothing less than shaping the future of our jurisdiction's documentary heritage. We are deciding what will be remembered and what will be forgotten, who in society will in the future be visible and who will remain invisible, who will have a voice and who will not.²

In contrast to the abundance of literature devoted to preservation and description, however, moving image archivists have written very little on the subject of appraisal. At present, only a single book—Sam Kula's Appraising Moving Images—is exclusively devoted to the subject.³ The available journal literature is limited to a few very specific topics, most notably the appraisal of television productions.⁴ Owing to the scarcity of literature and to the lack of communication between textual and moving image archivists, I suspect that the concept of archival appraisal is unclear or unfamiliar to many moving image archivists, including readers of this journal.⁵

Considering the extent of neglect and loss in early film history, it may seem justifiable for moving image archivists to accession almost anything into an archival environment that might otherwise be discarded.⁶ Nancy Marrelli describes two typical approaches to appraising audiovisual materials in general:

Keep it all because it all matters or, by contrast, don't worry too much about it because AV is not as important as textual documentation. Oddly enough, these two very different philosophies often get jumbled into a single approach: Keep everything but do nothing much about it.⁷

The current preservation challenges of digital media make appraisal theory a subject ripe for inquiry by moving image archivists. Renewed interest in appraisal has already been sparked by archivists forming preservation policies for the voluminous and increasingly born-digital output of broadcasting institutions.⁸ Of necessity, this literature is highly practical and technical in its response to specific preservation challenges.

This essay takes a more theoretical approach—namely, a reevaluation of generally held archival concepts of value as applied to ephemeral moving images, broadly defined as moving images produced to serve temporary functions. Traditional concepts of archival value, I argue, are rooted in positivist assumptions of evidence that do not apply to the ephemeral. I introduce an against the grain approach to archival appraisal, informed by critical revisions of basic concepts from appraisal theory with an interdisciplinary awareness of the moving image as a functional record—a document of the strategies behind its production. Finally, I argue for a proactive approach and a turn of focus from the appraisal of content and form to the appraisal of context and function.

Defining Ephemeral Moving Images

Within the early literature of archival theory, one often finds the adjective ephemeral used to describe records of little archival value. A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology published by the Society of American Archivists (SAA) defines "ephemeral value" as "useful or significant for a limited period of time" and notes that "records of ephemeral value, such as transitory records, are often scheduled to be destroyed after use."⁹ Ephemera is used in archival discourse to describe miscellaneous printed materials, such as flyers and pamphlets, that are created to serve temporary functions but not necessarily created as records to document those functions. Jim Burant questions whether ephemera in this sense can be appraised using traditional measurements of archival value, such as evidential and informational content. Ephemera, he warns, is valued by a public "sometimes for different reasons than we may have as archivists."¹⁰

Public enthusiasm for collecting ephemera, he argues, presents an intellectual challenge to generally held archival concepts of essential evidence...