Inside the Archive #67: Collecting born-digital work

As part of the Our Screen Heritage lottery programme, one goal has been to develop a streamlined way to collect born-digital content. We set out to understand how the archive currently acquires this type of material, identify the challenges involved, and begin shaping a future service for colleagues that could run beyond the life of the project.

We used a service design approach throughout. Initially, we had conceived of the work in mostly technical terms (delivering an ‘infrastructure’ solution), but we quickly realised that collecting digital works isn’t just about facilitating file transfer; it’s also about people and relationships. A wide range of people are needed to make it happen: curators, archivists, digital preservation specialists, legal colleagues and, of course, the filmmakers and organisations who donate their work.

Service design helped us look at the full picture: not just the technical infrastructure but also the workflows, interactions, and user needs and wants at each stage. It also helped us ensure that any solutions were grounded in evidence from real activities and real users.

Working closely with our colleagues from the Digital Service and Products team, we carried out the work across three phases (loosely corresponding to discovery, alpha and beta). In the earlier phases we established the groundwork by mapping existing processes and designing, prototyping, and testing potential improvements to the donor journey. We detailed this work in a previous blog.

Finally, in the beta phase, we’ve focused on putting these ideas into practice and embedding them in day-to-day operations.

A key focus of the beta phase was introducing content design practice. Good services depend on clear communication, and we knew from our user research that clear information and guidance were unmet needs for both donors and internal staff.

We ran a series of hands‑on content design training sessions across the teams involved in digital acquisitions. These aimed to build a shared understanding in clear, user-centred writing and give teams a shared language and toolkit for approaching content work.

We followed the training with co‑design workshops to apply these methods to our service guidance. These collaborative sessions brought together curators, archivists, digital preservation specialists and others to shape two key resources: a redesigned donor webpage and improved checksums guidance. We mapped user needs, pain points, personas and content priorities, building upon earlier work. After iteration and review, these resources are now ready to be incorporated into the service. They should provide a more supportive experience for donors and give staff a more consistent framework to work within.

As well as generating practical outputs, this work has equipped teams with new skills and processes we can continue to use to help us plan, write, manage, and make decisions about content.

We also conducted accessibility audits across various parts of the service and will be using these recommendations to ensure we meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) standards. In parallel, we are delivering training to the teams to upskill in the fundamentals of digital accessibility.

We’ve taken meaningful steps towards a digital acquisitions service that is clearer, more efficient and more user-friendly – for donors and colleagues alike.

– Samir Lee, Programme Delivery Manager

Acquiring born-digital works into the collection has presented new complications for the BFI National Archive curators. For well over a century the analogue era of filmmaking was built around a limited set of production formats. Film comes in only a few sizes, mostly 35mm, 16mm, 9.5mm or 8mm. Video production evolved across a wider variety of flavours and dimensions, but the outputs were standardised by engineers and industry bodies and then baked in by the cameras and tape machines. All of which means that when we are considering archiving such works, we can have a pretty good idea what we are getting.

Digital production is a whole different beast. It can range from a high-end facilities house to improvised home offices, to mobile phones, and can result in such a broad spectrum of bespoke outputs that it creates real problems for our acquisition workflows. There is a seemingly endless menu of options for creators when it comes to exporting their films: different file formats, codecs, bitrates, lossy compression, lossless compression, proprietary or open-source… It can cause heads to spin, both for curators and donors.

When we commit to preserve a work in the BFI National Archive, we are signing up to do so permanently, so our digital preservation team needs to understand exactly what we are signing up to. We need to be sure what the file is and whether it has a clear preservation roadmap into the future. Every digital work acquired is viewed in real-time to check quality, and the file is checked for compliance with encoding standards before it is ingested into our Digital Preservation Infrastructure. It means that we can only commit to preserving a finite number of digital items each year, and so it is important not to waste time and effort on corrupted or problematic files.

This has often led to an intricate and time-consuming set of dialogues to ensure that donors, curators and digital preservation technicians are all on the same page, and we haven’t always been able to get everything right. So it has been fantastic to be involved with the Our Screen Heritage project, looking for solutions to these complex issues. By taking a step back and reconsidering the perspective and experience of a range of people involved in the process, we were able to bring common pain points and misunderstandings to the surface. But it also birthed lively suggestions about potential fixes, short and long-term, many of which were carried into the content design phase.

That the solutions lay as much in humans as technology was a key lesson. There is never going to be a satisfactory Ctrl+Alt+Archive pipeline solution to such complex and evolving issues, so the key will always have to be clear communication. The project has helped set out a framework and common understanding with the potential to transform the experience of donating material to the BFI National Archive, both for internal staff and external creators.

– Jez Stewart, Collections Development Manager

The BFI’s marketing team is continually exploring new ways to reach audiences and, over the last year, has trialled a series of collaborations with popular online creators. 

Last month we were delighted to welcome social media influencer Paolo Abeabe (aka Woah Paolo) on a tour of the John Paul Getty Jr. Conservation Centre. During his visit, Paolo learned about the work that goes into conserving the archive’s celluloid collections via expert demonstrations courtesy of Milo Holmes, Ian Lawman and Martin Colfill.

With his camera whirring all the while, Paolo has since edited and published an engaging and thoughtful piece about the trip on his Instagram. The post has gone down a storm – watch the Instagram video by Paolo. 

Hungry for more social media depictions of the archive? Revisit WhispersRed’s ASMR rendering of the Conservation Centre and keep your eyes peeled for something very special from underground music chroniclers Tim & Barry.

– Alex Prideaux, Marketing & Events Manager, Our Screen Heritage

Our Screen Heritage and the Inside the Archive blog is supported by the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.