In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Editor's Introduction
  • Karen Gracy

It is my pleasure to introduce you to the first themed issue of The Moving Image, entitled "The End of Film as We Know It?" with guest editor Leo Enticknap and featuring articles by Dylan Cave, Dino Everett, and David Walsh. This issue is not our first foray into digital subject matter. My review of the content of the journal over the course of our first 8 years shows almost a dozen articles examining the impact of digital technology on our approaches to preservation, restoration, cataloging and metadata, exhibition, and online access.

The time is ripe for an issue focusing on digital concerns. The quickening pace of the transition from analog to digital technology in the filmmaking industry means that the field must be prepared for the tremendous changes in store, or already in progress, for moving image archives. In all aspects of archiving, we must reexamine our processes and practices, which are firmly rooted in the analog world. As Howard Besser argued in his Moving Image article of several years ago—"Digital Preservation of Moving Image Material?"—in order to care for digital moving images, we must adjust our orientation from artifact-based paradigm to the model of digital information stewardship.

Digital encoding is not "just another new format" for moving image archivists to handle. And though many traditional archivist skills can be applied to the new digitalmaterial (which is why thismaterial should be handled by archivists rather than technologists), digital works force a new paradigm of preserving disembodied content, and making sure that that content will be viewable far into the future.1 [End Page vi]

Apart from examining the skills required of the moving image archivist to deal with the new infrastructure of digital technology, however, we must also examine the economic, political, cultural, and philosophical ramifications of building the digital archive. With our current emphasis on the artifact, the moving image archive field has invested heavily in materiality and in concepts of evidential value: originality and authorial intent, authenticity, fixity of the object (and information contained within it), and the aesthetics of the format itself. Our activities, particularly preservation and restoration, reflect these biases. Much of our presupposed framework will be rethought in the digital era.

Although the transition from analog to digital is inexorable, it is worth remem-bering, however, that our legacy of over one hundred years of analog will persist in the archive. Though the impetus to digitize and to shift emphasis to the digital in our collec-tions will begin to predominate—given the economic and cultural pressures to relinquish the old and embrace the new technologies—analog media will almost certainly linger in many collections as certain members of the moving image community revisit and reaffirm the artifactual value of the film and video formats. To relinquish the analog completely and embrace the digital utterly is to rewire ourselves—are we prepared for that? I suspect not, given the blossoming of interest in historical formats that I witness at every AMIA conference, particularly among our students and newly minted professionals. For the foreseeable future, I predict thatmany moving image archives will be hybrids, sustaining the analog and the digital simultaneously for many years to come for those who continue to recognize those aspects of analog film and video that are unique. [End Page vii]

Although the greater part of our issue concerns the digital transition, I would also like to draw your attention to the second article in our Forum section, which is pre-sented by Ray Edmondson. Advocacy is the topic, and the focus is on the fight for control of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA)—an institution that the Aus-tralian government attempted to rebrand as ScreenSound Australia in 1999 and then integrate with the Australian Film Commission in 1994. This reorganization of the archive proved unpopular with both the archivists of the NFSA and the general public and it resulted in a series of confrontations that were very public. Ultimately, NFSA's autonomy was restored after a change in the Australian government. Edmondson has communi-cated the progress of this struggle for a number of years to AMIA members...

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