Interesting point re disposing of old negatives

BTW, has anyone noticed just how much negs and slides can go for on EBay etc.

I certainly have. £45 for a Wyvern at Yeovilton slide on ebay the other week.

Rob

Oops, better change that Kev, I haven’t polished any Spitfires for years (or added a hint of pink to a songbird ;))

Well it says Spitfire Polisher but don’t your duties also include attaching pink fluff to large black airframes?

Regards,

kev35

*Foams at the mouth at the thought of these original negatives being disposed of* 😡

First rule of duplication/active preservation by producing new copies from an original or master: RETAIN THE ORIGINAL/MASTER EVEN AFTER DUPLICATION/PRESERVATION!

AAAAAAAARGH!

(You can tell what line of work I am in, can’t you? ;))

………….at least they haven’t thrown them away!!

Let me tell you a story…

As you probably already know, I for my sins have been a “researcher” for a certain British built aircraft that was produced at the start of WWII down here in the Southwest…

As there is very little left of the 4000 drawing’s that were produced to make said aircraft, we have had to use any available material that has survived to help us with our reconstruction.

We knew of some photo’s showing interior shot’s of the aircraft’s structure that were taken by a War Dept. and that they all had War Dept. negative numbers sequentially shown on each image…

We contacted the Museum who had the original glass negative’s and thought they would be able to let us have copies of the 30 odd photo’s we needed… But they told us they had donated a case containing them and many others to another Museum in London some 10 years before.

So we contacted that museum and asked if they could look for the negatives we were after so we could order copies…

Time passed…

Eventually we were told that ‘Yes’ the museum did have the case of negative’s, but ‘if’ it was opened it would then have to be ‘catalogued’ and because of ‘staff shortage’s’ and lack of time it would ‘not’ be opened for the foreseeable future…

More time passes…

After which we were allowed to view certain albums that were also donated by the other museum. Looking through them turned up one, very dark photo showing a near completed prototype, but they did not contain any of the photo’s that we specifically needed…

Later we were told that the photo’s we were looking for were very probably in the case containing the ‘glass negatives’ but as the museum couldn’t spare anyone to look for them, the ‘case’ would stay closed for the foreseeable future…

And this is not just the preserve of the museums. Certain magazines have tucked away in their archives, material over 70 years old that would again be invaluable, but will not allow any access for research purposes, but rather keep it all locked away in the dark till God knows when…

What ever is the point of having any of it, if it is never shown the light of day and God forgive to make bloody use of it to recreate a real aircraft…

Perhaps I didn’t make it clear in my earlier posts that I too am horrified that ‘recycling’ of images is even considered, and I still can’t get my head round how much you have to recycle to make it economically worth doing. What has not been made clear, at least on this forum, is precisely what is being ‘got rid of’. Until I see that, I’ll reserve judgement. Anyone familiar with professional film photography (and many amateurs) will have seen plenty of discarded images (not sharp, lighting not right, not what the client wanted, or even the old air-show favourite where someone walks in front of you at the wrong moment, and for many other reasons), half-shot film (all that was needed for the job, or removed from the camera because a different film rating was needed, or whatever). Clearly an unstructured collection could conceivably contain stuff that was of no value whatsoever. In this case we don’t know.

Objective discussions on ‘value’ aside, as I see it there are three separate issues here.
1. Copyright
2. Custodianship
3. Technology
and before anyone gets excited, those are simply in the order I typed them, not any particular order of merit. Rearrange as you see fit.

Copyright.
Useful information on the legal aspects can be found here
http://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/p10_duration
and on other pages on the same site. Whichever duration you apply, it is clear that some photographs taken by individuals must be old enough that they are now in the public domain, previously published or not, because photography as an art is that old. Equally, anything less than 50 years old is protected. In between there’s a nasty grey area just waiting for the unwary to slip into it. Add to that the fact that many museum collections contain donations of uncertain provenance and for which the original photographer is often unknown. If there’s any doubt, most museums – and any other organisation or individual – will find it prudent to err on the side of caution. If they decide to take a chance, that’s when you see published photos credited as ‘So-and-so collection’ – it’s an admission that they don’t know where it really came from. Compound that with the problem of location – if it wasn’t definitely taken in a public place, then where, and who ‘s permission is necessary? And if you include not only still images but also movies, you multiply the problem further by having to consider individual actors, various different elements of the soundtrack and so forth. Often even if you know who the original copyright holder was, tracking down them or those who have succeeded them proves well-nigh impossible. Copyright assignment is very much a one-way street – easy to prove if it was assigned to you, but impossible to spot that it’s been done simply by looking at an image. A minefield. Small wonder that images stay hidden.

Custodianship.
Clearly no museum can be expected to keep and preserve everything it comes into contact with. Quite apart from any funding considerations, the world just isn’t big enough. But equally there is an obligation to preserve as much as possible. If a museum and their staff don’t feel that obligation, they’re in the wrong job. Where this gets sticky is in deciding just which story it is you’re obliged to tell. As an example, lets consider something hypothetical and non-aviation: A village museum might have a policy of telling the history of their village and environs, within, say, the parish boundaries. If they are bequeathed the photo collection of a well-known local character who lived on the edge of the parish, and who took many pictures of their village and many outside, what do they do with those that do not fit their (self-imposed) mandate? Open a separate gallery for ‘the collection’? Oh, to have the funds and space to do that at the drop of a hat. To sell them invites the ridicule of some who think a collection should never be split, and such controversy can be the death knell of a small museum. Or do they store them somewhere so that someone else gets to work out what to do with them? Probably the most likely option. Then, when they’re re-discovered in 50 years time, they’re either a revelation, a window back to a forgotten past, or they ‘re a soggy mess of decaying pulp and mouldy negatives that are no use to anyone. Obviously we can play this game for ever, imagining different scenarios, but I think that covers what I want to say.

Technology.
As others have commented, copying digital images can be done without any loss of quality – indeed a simple copy from one location to another guarantees the two files are the same. Manipulation of the image often – perhaps always – is at the expense of some loss of quality. Many people don’t understand the difference. Cost is another issue. When I started messing about with Personal Computers more than 30 years ago, 10MB of storage came a price which would buy you a nice car. These days 10MB is too small a volume to worry about, but bigger storage costs less than £1 for 100 times more. On the other hand I wouldn’t want to guarantee I’d fit a single image from my phone into 10MB, let alone from my DSLR. If I have a good negative or slide, I can project it to fill a wall, stand close and probably get something useful from depth of detail in the image. While scanning is comparatively cheap and will give you an image you might print to A4 or even A3 if you’re lucky (or larger if we’re talking about ‘art’ rather than satisfying picky enthusiasts), scanning at that sort of resolution is not available at a price most museum organisations can afford, if, currently, at all. Certainly you won’t be doing it for a whole collection. Scanning is itself a ‘lossy’ process. One has to make assumptions about film stock, exposure, white balance and so forth, to say nothing of age-related problems such as warped negatives, cracked glass plates, chemical fading or a host of other problems. Change the settings and you may well get a perfectly usable image, but it’ll be a different one – from the same original. How many variations would you need before you’d extracted every bit of information from that original and could say it was redundant? No, I can’t answer that either. Moreover, advances in technology, and it’s cost-effectiveness, are not easily predictable. Who’s to say that in a few years time we may not be able to electronically refocus a blurred print, or (reliably and correctly) extrapolate detail into the background of an image. Insert your favourite ‘dream processing option’ here. To quote Arthur C. Clarke “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” In a museum context, one needs to be really sure that something is of no historical value, and never will be, before destroying it. As others have pointed out, if you don’t want it, why not give someone else the chance?

A couple of days ago I attended a showing of Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The Manxman’ – his last wholly silent film, released in 1929 – as part of the London Film Festival. In the presentation before the film, they were at pains to point out that the restoration of this film to the high standard we saw was made possible by combining elements from both the original negative and two prints on different film stock, and a complete restoration wouldn’t have been possible without any one of those. The resulting digital ‘film’ is good enough to be shown in a proper, full size, cinema, and to go onto DVD and BlueRay release, but there’s no suggestion that the BFI will be ditching the originals. Iindeed the programme notes state that this approach proves “the value of keeping all available materials.” Realistically not every organisation can aspire to that, but deliberately depriving others of the opportunity could start to look like vandalism unless there were compelling reasons to the contrary.

this is an AMAZINGLY bad decision! I have a library of over 20 hours of old motor racing film. I have had it copied onto professional videotape, from there it’s gone onto various hard drives around the place. But I would NEVER get rid of the film originals. Surely RR Heritage aren’t THAT hard up??

Have museums considered placing all of their images on the internet and making them public domain?

My experience of museums and (in particular) the likes of the British Library is that yes they have a public remit to preserve and display, but are as interested in earnings and potential income as the next company. Old images have value, but not if they are given away…

The British Library are scanning out-of-copyright newspapers – public domain stuff – and are reasserting copyright over the scan. Why? So they can make money…I should add that making money is not an issue, but why should a public body claim ownership over something that is not theirs is what I find objectionable.

So yes, a great idea…but the earning potential of old collections is something museums will want to protect.

Hmm, old negatives are good enough that images taken in WWI are still viewable almost 100 years later – if stored correctly they will probably far outlast digital images.

I think there is too much reliance on digital media and to destroy the original negatives just to get a few bucks seems very shortsighted IMO…

Digital isn’t perfect and needs to be ‘handled’ correctly otherwise the image will degrade.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_loss

I completely agree that originals should be retained. What seems like a good digital copy of a negative today may look like a pretty low-resolution attempt in a few years time.

As regards longevity, in general film negatives seem pretty stable – but they aren’t immune from degradation. Try looking up “Vinegar Syndrome”. I’ve personally seen a number of negatives affected by that.

Digital images cannot degrade, but the storage medium can (and formats can be superseded). What that means is that digital copies need to be regularly recopied to ensure that are a (a) on a good medium, and (b) in a valid format. However, the cost/effort of recopying is getting cheaper all the time, so this isn’t necessarily a huge chore.

Just my 2p worth.

Although I have forsaken the joys of old fashioned light and chemistry for the instant gratification of digital. there is no way I could destroy an original negative or transparency. There is one fundamental difference between film and digital. That piece of film was THERE.

Hmm, old negatives are good enough that images taken in WWI are still viewable almost 100 years later – if stored correctly they will probably far outlast digital images.

I think there is too much reliance on digital media and to destroy the original negatives just to get a few bucks seems very shortsighted IMO…

Digital isn’t perfect and needs to be ‘handled’ correctly otherwise the image will degrade.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_loss

Digital technology used correctly can eliminate generation loss. Copying a digital file gives an exact copy if the equipment is operating properly. This trait of digital technology has given rise to awareness of the risk of unauthorized copying. Before digital technology was widespread, a record label, for example, could rest easy in knowing that unauthorized copies of their music tracks were never as good as the originals.

Processing a lossily compressed file rather than an original usually results in more loss of quality than generating the same output from an uncompressed original. For example, a low-resolution digital image for a web page is better if generated from an uncompressed raw image than from an already-compressed JPEG file of higher quality.

In digital systems, several techniques, used because of other advantages, may reintroduce generation loss and must be used with caution. However, copying a digital file itself incurs no generation loss — the copied file is identical to the original, provided a perfect copying channel is used

Simply copying a hard disk set of stored images creates no image degradation at all, digital photo image degradation now relates to printing or other presentation/regeneration options, and the ability to store (and share) multiple copies without degrading the image storage medium makes digital storage far more viable and logical than negative and film storage.

Film stock requires specific handling and storage environments and is difficult to make available to researchers while maximising protection and security.

I think most collections will eventually digitise image collections, ie slide/negative and prints for both long term secure storage and simply to be able to index, sort and access their images and make them accessible to others, rather than storing both hard copy prints and negatives, and resorting to the negative to provide more copies.

That does then raise the issue of the value of also retaining and storing the old image mediums.

Its reasonable to retain collections of original media when it “in itself” have some provenance, Douglas Bader’s private slide collection or glass plate negatives taken by the Wright Brothers at Kittyhawk, but the vast majority of these collections have their value in the stored image, not the medium they are stored in.

regards

Mark Pilkington

Have museums considered placing all of their images on the internet and making them public domain?
Disaster can strike any organization. Digital media can be lost. By placing them online (as well as using other backup mediums) you have a way of retrieving lost images from public collections.
I have been able to purchase previously lost or deleted films this way.

Early CD’s will deteriorate in some instances within 20 years. Modern DVD’s about 100 years. Even so you need a policy of re-copying the data periodically. As the size of collections grows into terabytes of data this is going to get time consuming and costly.

My own personal data for example is backed up across disc’s, across 2 pc’s, onto external discs and DVDs. Even so I still place some images online and keep a hard-copy.

Does anyone know the policy in UK museums/archives?

Right now, unless the museum/archive owns the rights, or can contact the rights holder for permission, scanning an image is a breach of copyright.

In practice, it happens and to the best of my knowledge no one has ever been taken to task.

But there is now pressure from certain aspects of the the Cultural Heritage Sector to seek changes to the law that would allow commercial exploitation without permission from the rights holder. And the proposed changes would not restrict museums to this behaviour, but would allow any commercial organisation to make money from someone else’s property.

As a creator dependant on income from my images, I am very uncomfortable with this. Creators have offered a compromise of ‘preserve, digitse and use for non-commercial purposes’ but both HMG Intellectual Property Office and the Cultural Heritage sector are still seeking commercial rights to something that someone else owns.

It’s of course ok to make digital copies of originals.

But NEVER, NEVER, NEVER (yes, caplocks) throw away the originals in any case!

I don’t like the thought of destroying original negatives much at all. If you follow this process to the ultimate conclusion you would see all national film archives (ie Aust, UK, US etc..) as well as smaller collections such as AWM, IWM, RAFM digitising their entire film holdings and then destroying everything. They wouldn’t need to spend all their money on maintaining massive climate controlled storage facilities, employing specialist film archivists and so on, they’d just need a few big computers….. And I don’t see that happening.

Here’s a quote from the following article
“Digitisation is not a panacea,” said Baker. “We have no idea what state the digital files we look after are going to be in in 100 years’ time. I don’t know how many times we’ll have to copy digital files over the next couple of centuries and what information we may lose.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/aug/29/bfi-new-film-storage-facility

Paul

I certainly wouldn’t ditch my negatives or slides, my very earliest digital pictures have degredated quite badly.
I’m wondering though if many of these negs were multiple images of the same subject.

BTW, has anyone noticed just how much negs and slides can go for on EBay etc.

Whilst I can understand the practical and commercial reasoning behind the policy, it seems to rely upon the premise that there is no intrinsic value in old negatives and that only the image, not the medium, has importance. However if that is the way that the US branch of the RRHT has decided to go, might they not gain more financial benefit still by selling the negatives by tender, auction or suchlike? That has the added advantage that there is a chance that the negatives will survive, albeit in the hands of others, in addition to generating a financial benefit for the Trust.

An excellent point. As I mentioned earlier, one would tend to assume that copyright went with the negative. Maybe they don’t want someone else to have the copyright? However, it is difficult to see how destroying the negative, so that, realistically, no-one can prove incontrovertible ownership of an image, improves matters! Makes one wonder just how well this has been thought through.

Whilst I can understand the practical and commercial reasoning behind the policy, it seems to rely upon the premise that there is no intrinsic value in old negatives and that only the image, not the medium, has importance. However if that is the way that the US branch of the RRHT has decided to go, might they not gain more financial benefit still by selling the negatives by tender, auction or suchlike? That has the added advantage that there is a chance that the negatives will survive, albeit in the hands of others, in addition to generating a financial benefit for the Trust.

I’m going slightly weak at the knees trying to figure out how many negatives you’d have to recycle to get enough scrap silver to even pay for the fuel used to take them somewhere for the process, let alone derive any significant benefit.
…..

Apparently over 260 pounds (weight) of negatives at the time the report was written. I don’t know to what extent it was connected, but the parent company Allison was moving premises and the branch was concerned about storage space for the additional archive material obtained as a result.