Moving Image and Sound Collections for Archivists by Anthony Cocciolo (review)

It is easy to see why Antony Cocciolo’s book, Moving Image and Sound Collections for Archivists, won the Society of American Archivists’ 2018 Waldo Gifford Leland Award for writing of superior excellence and usefulness in the field of archival history, theory, or practice. Audiovisual preservation can be a complex, nuanced, and resource-intensive undertaking, and Cocciolo’s book offers solutions for low-cost, do-it-yourself digitization and preservation using open-source access tools (p. 185). It takes the position that “the preservation of and access to moving image and sound records is best advanced by reformatting them to digital formats . . . and engaging in digital preservation of those assets” (p. 3). In creating this guide for the non-specialist, Cocciolo sifts through an abundance of information, highlighting nuggets that are carefully balanced to avoid overwhelming the reader.

Cocciolo, who is currently Dean at the Pratt Institute School of Information, is an associate professor with expertise in digital preservation. In his sound and moving image course, he formed partnerships with archival institutions to provide students with hands-on expertise and noticed that media holdings were mainly ignored by many archivists.¹ This, in addition to his inability to locate a concise publication that covered the preservation of film, video, and sound recordings for his course,² led Cocciolo to decide to “data dump” his course into a book³ for the benefit of the professional community. With chapters mirroring weekly themes in his course syllabus,⁴ the thematic organization of Moving Image and Sound Collections for Archivists makes it easy to dive in to a specific area of interest and makes the book a handy reference guide. Moving Image and Sound Collections for Archivists is divided into two parts: the first half of the book concentrates on archival activities (appraisal, accessioning, legal issues, digital preservation, and outreach) and the second outlines the intricacies of specific formats (audio, film, video, digital video, and complex media). Each chapter integrates analog and digital records and includes an introduction to the subject, an explanation of theoretical and practical knowledge, and an outline of a case study about preserving records on a shoestring budget.

The first chapter, on appraisal, summarizes archival theory on the topic and dives into the unique appraisal activities specific to audiovisual holdings. Cocciolo emphasizes that audiovisual records are both time- and labour-intensive, with appraisal typically occurring at an item level (p. 11). He also provides insights into what some consider more advanced acquisition methods, such as the bulk extraction of video content from the application program interfaces (APIs) of social media platforms (p. 14). He outlines the importance of reappraisal to mitigate resource constraints and demonstrates this through the case study, which recounts a decision to preserve high-resolution videos of exhibition material and to save storage space by preserving compressed video recordings of corporate meetings (p. 15).

The next chapter, titled “Accessioning, Arrangement, and Description,” focuses primarily on processing audiovisual records. It also explores information covering physical and digital storage and the advantages or disadvantages of varying metadata standards. Cocciolo’s practical approach is highlighted in this chapter, which includes, for example, suggestions to simplify audio cassette digitization by creating a single file for a set of digitized recordings rather than creating one file each for side A and side B (p. 34). While introducing the reader to many possible schemas and identifiers, including PBCore (a cataloguing standard for the description of audiovisual content developed by the American broadcasting community), Moving Image and Sound Collections for Archivists is clearly written for an American audience. Nevertheless, it is relevant to Canadian archivists and may broaden Canadian archival thinking. For example, if reading-room access to media is hindered by a lack of playback equipment, compliance with Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS) requires a descriptive note and, while this is absent from the Rules for Archival Description (RAD), inclusion of such a note in Canadian descriptive practices would result in...