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Lucia Udvardyova: Can you tell us something about the history of the CCCB archive?
Elisabet Goula: The history of the archive is a very short one because it was only opened last January. Our main goal when we started, was to enable the public to consult all the materials that have been created within the CCCB over the 15 years of its existence. The CCCB has a lot of materials from audiovisual conferences, exhibitions, festivals, etc. Additionally, the Centre also disposes of materials, programmes, publications, pictures, photographs and press releases that were previously not available to the public directly. We decided to create a point for public consultation but at the same time we wanted this archive to be a thematic collection in order to accentuate the main issues and subjects that the CCCB has reflected on during all these years. The four main sections are: human condition (ongoing), world and cosmopolitanism (next one to open in October), city and creation. Our audiovisual archive Xcentric was created two years ago in conjunction with the Xcentric exhibition. Xcentric is CCCB's programme showcasing experimental cinematography. Currently, visitors can consult around 600 movies. The archive has a very clear objective – to showcase films. Our future objective is to consolidate all of the materials of the CCCB under one umbrella of a CCCB archive.
Sonja Aran: In October, another archive will be created – The Kosmopolis archive which will be also integrated into the main CCCB archive.
LU: Will the CCCB archives be accessible online?
SA: We are thinking about it but it is a complex issue. In the meantime, the archive is only accessible offline here in the premises of the CCCB.
LU: What are the major obstructions to putting it online?
SA: There are several issues. The first one is a technological issue, the second is linguistic – you have to translate more things, and there is also the copyright issue. The plan to put it online does exist but we do not have a set date at the moment. In the meantime, we are also putting some of the materials on our website.
Michal Brenner: Are both systems interconnected (website and archive)?
SA: No, currently these two entities are divided into two different systems. The objective is to unify them into one system not only the website and the archive, but also CCCB's internal issues. We changed the system of the website three years ago and we are still in the process of deciding whether it suits our needs.
LU: The Xcentric archive currently has some videos online?
EG: Only trailers, not the whole movies. I do not think the Xcentric archive will be able to be online, as it is very difficult to obtain the movie rights.
LU: Can you tell us about the process of archive creation? Editorial, access, etc.
SA: The project was created at the Centre de Documentació, since all the CCCB's materials were located at this center. There was a need to organize all these activities.
EG: The current archive functions as an archive for the whole Centre. The main impetus for the creation of a unified archive was that we did not have a sufficient infrastructure to store all the materials that the CCCB has amassed over the years and also to enable the public to consult all these materials in an organized structure. Right now, the people who are working with the archive are the people who work at a specific department, even though the whole institution does get involved. 3-5 people have been working on the archive. It could be said that the CCCB archive has a double dimension –it is an exhibition and an archive.
MB: How does a new work become part of the archive?
EG: Currently, we are working mainly with the past. All the activities in CCCB over last 15 years are divided into 4 subjects / main themes: the human condition, cosmopolitanism, the city and public space, and artistic creation. The objective is that after completion of the archiving process, all the activities within the CCCB will be categorized under one of these themes – all materials, exhibition, cycles of conferences, festivals, cinema. The current exhibition, Paradoxical Times, will be running until September, in October it will be cosmopolitanism until the next summer, at the end of the four cycles, all that we have done will be here in the archive for public consultation. The system of incorporating something into the archive was following: we had the list with all the activities that we have done, and we decided to categorize it according to the main themes. If we have something regarding city, we will do it in two years when we will prepare the exhibition for the city, if we have something regarding the world or cosmopolitanism, we will do it now. The problem that we have is that during the time we are working with the past, there is of course also the present, so we try to incorporate the activities of the present into the archive. So for instance the next Kosmopolis festival will be incorporated into the Kosmopolis archive, or the current cycles of conferences which are concerning cosmopolitanism will be incorporated into the archive as well.
MB: So you two have the sole editorial access to the archive?
EG: Yes. I think the problem – and future concern - is that after all the past materials of the CCCB will have been stored in the archive, the focus will shift on the present which requires concerted effort from all the people working at the Centre. People who are working on festivals, etc will have to get used to passing information to the archive. Hence, in future the modus operandi of the archive will have to change. This also concerns the website, everybody will have to upload relevant data to the website.
SA: Our longterm plan is to interconnect the website and the archive. The objective is that all the people from the various departments will be updating both the archive and the website.
LU: In what kind of time frame are you thinking of making these changes?
EG: I think this will be a long process which will require a change of infrastructure. It is a question of money and time, which for us as a public institution is not easy. So I would say two or three years. We are all aware of the need for change. There are a lot of people involved, so it has to be a system that everybody will feel comfortable working with. The CCCB is a large institution with more than 150 employees whose financing is public, so it has to be justified. These kind of changes are slow and complicated.
LU: Can you tell us more about these four thematic areas that you have?
EG: The current exhibition at the CCCB is Paradoxical Times which is about the human condition. Thus all the materials that you can now consult are concerning this issue. For the next one, which will be War and Cosmpolitanism, you will find all the materials concerning that issue as well as the older ones. The archive processing is cumulative, which means that at the end of all four exhibitions, all the materials should be made available.
LU: What are the main copyright issues?
SA: When somebody comes here to speak, we make them sign a special contract which permits us to publish it online and in the archive. The main problem for us is mainly with the past, the problem is not with the future, as we are now asking for these rights. It is very difficult to get these rights retrospectively. The same applies to the videos. The copyright issues influence what we can put online, etc.
LU: Do you have any tips regarding archives and copyright?
SA: Be patient. It is a very long process. Usually, if you just speak to someone in person it is much easier to get these rights. However, if it concerns an activity from ten years ago, it is sometimes very difficult. Over the years, there have been more than 1,500 guests at the CCCB, so obtaining all the relevant information can be extremely laborious.
LU: Do you collaborate with any other similar archives?
EG: Not directly.
SA: At the CCCB we have a lot of what we call associated groups here in the city and some of them have their archives, which we have helped to develop, but we are not involved in their projects. And now we are also talking about incorporating those archives in future so that everybody that will come here will have information connectivity that is directly made by CCCB or by groups that we are working with.
MB: Is the public interface the only one you have at the moment, or do you have other interfaces to the archive, for internal use, internet, etc?
EG: No, because now the CCCB archive has the interface for public consultation and maybe in future we will have also one for the internet but we are now working on the next archive.
SA: We are currently changing the system. The current archive is very simple, made in a very short time with few resources. Thus it does not allow us to function on a more complex level. It is made in Access behind with Visual Basic and it was intended for public consultation. What we are now trying to do is make possible that the archive would be not just for the public but for internal use as well. This would mean that not all the information we will put into archive will be automatically available to the public.
Right now, we are still at the beginning. The new system will be an SQL database and it will be running on ASP.NET to enable internet interface. We also work with Sharepoint to make it available for everyone within our institution and our team. We are still trying it out. It is going to be a big improvement from the current system. The public interface will be the same but it will have an internal interface.
MB: Is it currently possible for the public viewers to enter any kind of information, leave comments or collaborate in any other sense?
SA: No. That was also one of our requirements for the existing system but we didn't have the necessary resources. Our new system should allow this to some extent. Not in the sense of interactivity but it will allow people to request and receive some offline information using e-mail. We will also have a statistical system that will reveal what the public is interested in and, subsequently, we can re-arrange the archive and the user interface, maybe drop the search-by-date feature if it is not used at all. At this moment, we are not planning any collaborative features for our archive.
LU: What if the archive is online?
SA: Well that would be different. The online platform has more possibilities, such as creating blogs or wikis that the public can contribute to. We have found out from our research that people would like to participate at some activities in CCCB, add their own content. Right now, the archive is in its preliminary stages so we would like to retain control over it but in future, we do not rule out opening it.
EG: There is a big range of options for the future what pertains our archive but right now we are more concerned with offering all our existing materials to the public and have it as an organized structure. We are very busy with digitalization. Some of the videos have very old formats and they have to be digitalized.
SA: It is crucial to bear in mind that all our materials are important for future generations. This has often not been the case in the past.
EG: The CCCB is a very young institution, it only exists for 15 years now. For the first ten years the people working here were preoccupied with the present, this has changed now with the archive. Even though we are a relatively young institution, we are at a point when we have already gathered a lot of material and content. The CCCB is not an art institution or a museum so we do not have a permanent collection. The archive is our collection of materials which we have created over the years and some them are truly unique. It is necessary to preserve all this material.
MB: What is the structure of the archive, what kind of material do you put into your archive?
SA: Various materials including text, photography, audio and video.
MB: How do you treat these different formats?
EG: We treat them in the same way. If you look for certain information using our interface by activity, it will always by a thematic way or by author, you cannot search by format. You can choose an exhibition and if you look at that exhibition, you can check all the available information whether it is text, catalogue, photograph or a video. And you can also access all the technical information regarding the artefact. We also have full-text search, for the next version we will have a thematic search as well.
MB: How do you create or treat the metadata for the material you have?
SA: Since we did not have time for this at the beginning, we did not treat the metadata for every material (eg. an image) individually but as metadata for a whole set of materials about a particular activity. We do not use it in the present system. This will change once we have our new system, for example there will be information about the author, date, etc related to certain artefact.
MB: Does this also apply to video?
SA: Yes, in the next version it will be possible to search by metadata.
EG: In the next version there will be much more metadata than is the case now. For example, each video can have a lot of different formats – the original recording, a subtitled version, version in different languages. In practice this could mean that for one artefact we can have 15 to 20 different formats or versions. Consequenlty, metadata will become very important, though it will be not available to public, only for our own use.
MB: How and when do you create the metadata?
SA: We have an audiovisual department that works on digitalization of all these materials and then there are the people who work with the archive and are responsible for entering all the information. The audiovisual and the archive departments collaborate on gathering all this information since some of it is technical.
SA: Some metadata can be gathered during the digitalization, for example the length of a particular video but we have to investigate other information. Much of this material is 10 years old and we have to find the responsible person who might not be working at the Centre anymore so we have to research all the information ourselves. It is a long process but it has to be done in order to ensure that all the information is correct.
EG: One example: for the next exhibition about cosmopolitanism we have more than 500 videos. So the digitalization of such amount of material, including all the version, all the formats, etc is a very laborious process. And we have two more themes to work on in future.
MB: So if you have 20 different versions, do you digitalize and archive all the materials?
EG: Because you need hours in real-time of video, the idea is that right now, we only digitalize the version that we need for public viewing and perhaps also the original version, and only store metadata for the other versions and give a topographic identification about where to find its physical copy. It would not be possible to digitalize all the materials because of the amount of time needed but at least we have identified all the material that we have.
SA: The idea is to have all the versions, with different language versions, subtitles, different edits digitalized. For the moment, we are prioritizing.
EG: It is simply a question of time. We have four months but would need several years to do all of it.
MB: Do you have a plan, a detailed proposition for the next version of the archive that you have been talking about? Have you chosen the suitable technologies or formats - Quicktime vs MPEG2, etc.?
SA: This is a difficult issue because of the rapidly changing technologies. For example most of the videos that we have are in the AVI or MPEG2 formats. We are converting these to MPEG4 and FLV for the website but who knows what we will use in two or ten years. We are not thinking that far ahead. We usually store the original in uncompressed AVI and we are making different formats from that. If in three years there will be a new standard, we will convert it again. We do not like to be limited by technology, so we are looking for a system that would work with every format that we currently have.
MB: Who is working on that system? Are you developing it in-house or do you have an external developing company?
SA: Usually it is done by our audiovisual department. They are very involved in the process of choosing the best technology and are aware of the latest trends in that field. The AV department also participates in other activities of the CCCB, not just the archive. The AV department decides what format or technology to use. From our position as the archive, our only concern is that the technology is not going to be a limitation in future.
MB: What about the software, the server you use?
SA: We use the Sharepoint platform and we have external suppliers developing the archive who closely cooperate with our audiovisual department.
June 19, 2008 Barcelona, Spain. Interview conducted by Lucia Udvardyova and Michal Brenner.
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