Crisis or Opportunity: AV Athletics in a University Archive
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This presentation on athletics video content in university archives was delivered at the 2015 Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) conference.
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Crisis or Opportunity: AV Athletics in a University Archive
- 1. MOLLY ROSE STEED MOLLY.STEED@UTAH.EDU UNIVERSITY OF UTAH J. WILLARD MARRIOTT LIBRARY CRISIS OR OPPORTUNITY: AV Athletics in a University Archive
- 3. Our Mandate “ALL UNIVERSITY RECORDS OF PERMANENT OR HISTORIC VALUE SHOULD BE TRANSFERRED TO THE UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES ” http://regulations.utah.edu/general/1-009.php
- 4. Existing Collections Negligible Representation Football (men) 16mm & VHS 1960s-1990s Basketball (men) 16mm 1950s-1990s Basketball (women) VHS 1987-2000 Gymnastics (women) VHS 1980s-2000s Baseball (men) Cross Country (women) Golf (men) Skiing (men) Skiing (women) Soccer (women) Softball (women) Swimming & Diving (men) Swimming & Diving (women) Tennis (men) Tennis (women) Track & Field (women) Volleyball (women) Special Collections Legacy
- 5. Athletics Footage Yesterday and Today Clip removed to make the file smaller!
- 6. The Good Improved coverage of athletics history
- 7. The Good Improved coverage of athletics history Improved reference and organization Hierarchies and metadata established before accession
- 8. Football All Other Sports Athletics Digital Organization
- 9. Naming Convention Men’s Basketball Clips Year Sport Opponent Student Athlete Athlete Level File Names
- 10. The Good Improved coverage of athletics history Improved reference and organization Hierarchies and metadata established before accession Improved partnership with Athletics Department Licensing expertise Reference expertise Streamlined access
- 11. The Bad Multiple TB added yearly 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 2012 2013 2014 2015 Estimated Athletics Data Growth (TB) Older Files New Other Sports New Football
- 12. The Bad Multiple TB added yearly Compression necessary for this scale of production 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 2012 2013 2014 2015 Estimated Athletics Data Growth (TB) Older Files New Other Sports New Football
- 13. The Bad Multiple TB added yearly Compression necessary for this scale of production Athletics server workspace nearly full 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 2012 2013 2014 2015 Estimated Athletics Data Growth (TB) Older Files New Other Sports New Football
- 14. The Ugly No budget to accommodate new digital material
- 15. The Ugly No budget to accommodate new digital material Huge amount of legacy analog and digital tape SPC Athletics Individual sports offices
- 17. Our Dream Permanent annual budget scaled for collection growth
- 18. Alternatives One-time funding options Fans Alumni Grants
- 19. Alternatives One-time funding options Fans Alumni Grants Compress archival video more aggressively
- 20. Alternatives One-time funding options Fans Alumni Grants Compress archival video more aggressively Discard some digital files
- 21. M O L L Y . S T E E D @ U T A H . E D U The End https://instagram.com/utahathletics/
Editor's Notes
- In this presentation, I’m going to give an overview of what Special Collections is already doing to fulfill its duty as a repository for the University of Utah’s athletics films and outline the challenges and opportunities coming in the very near future. Sports video is of one of the greatest challenges the Marriott Library faces in its role as a University Archive, and the football stadium next door serves as a constant reminder. This is the view from my office window.
- And this is the view in the other direction. As you can see, we have more boxes and films than fit on our shelves already, and we’re facing a similar impasse in our digital archive. For decades, Special Collections has institutionalized a “take it now, find somewhere to put it later” mentality and aggressively accumulated the papers, photographs, audio, and video of any willing donor whose materials help tell the story of Utah and the West.
- In addition to the regional history we collect, Special Collections is also responsible for maintaining and making accessible “all university records of permanent or historic value,” including athletics video.
- In practice, deposits from all departments, including Athletics, have been spotty at best. Demand is high; we regularly receive requests from university departments, students, alumni, and sports historians, and we have made some progress in making materials accessible, beginning with the digitization of our football coach’s films. But there are many requests for historic sports video that we will never be able to fill because we never received the items in the first place. Many sporting events were never recorded, and many that were have never found their way to Special Collections. Instead, items have been thrown away, taken home by coaches or players, or buried in office closets. The University of Utah offers 7 sports for men and 10 for women, but Special Collections only currently represents the four most popular: football, men’s and women’s basketball, and women’s gymnastics, and these collections are far from complete. However, even with this spotty representation of our athletics history, we are already struggling with the cost of preserving a huge amount of data, with over 11 TB of digital football alone. On top of that, we face the enormous processing challenge of providing genuine helpful, ideally athlete-level metadata. Most of our collections have only a basic inventory, making it nearly impossible to locate footage of specific players, which is often how we receive requests. Instead, we have to provide people with games from the correct era and hope the person they want played that day, or we have to assign a staff member to the time-intensive task of searching through footage for a jersey number they may or may not be able to see. But as big a challenge as these existing collections represent, it pales in comparison to our responsibility to archive the athletics footage being created now.
- [play clip] [at start of clip] This is the oldest Athletics film in the archive, a highlights reel from Utah’s 1934 Thanksgiving Day game against Utah State. [at start of color football] Most of the videos and coach’s films in the archive look more like this. As you can see, most of this footage is silent and shot from very far away. Some later collections you’re about to see include sound, closer footage, and edited montages, but nothing on the scale of the contemporary footage you’ll see at the end of this video. Gone are the days of spotty, decentralized coverage of University of Utah athletics. Now, the Athletics Department creates and collects footage of all sports. They capture highlights of all home events and gather extensive home and away coverage for more popular sports, including complete television and radio broadcasts.
- From the perspective of historians and fans, this represents a major improvement. Although athletics coverage is still dominated by football, which makes up approximately half of Athletics’ modern video output, video records of all sports are now being generated.
- Archivists can also rejoice in the increased organization of AV material. For the most part, our current collections arrive in bulk with no accompanying inventory or organizational structure. Digital files certainly have the potential to rival or exceed this kind of processing mess, but the we have been very lucky.
- In 2013, Athletics hired Skip Whitman as Director of Video and Broadcast Services, a position in charge not only of producing new video but also of saving and distributing Athletics related AV. Skip petitioned Athletics Director Chris Hill for a server array to provide a more stable storage environment for the department’s digital video and divided it into two sections – football and other sports. All of the coverage is organized by year, game, and camera, with separate sections for edited highlights reels and TV and Radio broadcasts.
- For most sports, footage the university takes is edited down to highlight clips, which are named according to year, sport, opponent, and student athlete. Although some files may still need to be cleaned up for permanent archiving, Skip’s organization and naming conventions will allow the modern record to enter Special Collections with an existing organizational hierarchy and a significant amount of metadata. This structure will majorly ease the burden of processing and finally make player-level reference not only possible but easy.
- As we work more closely with Athletics, we will also benefit from shared knowledge and streamlined workflows that will save time and give both parties more confidence when dealing with archival materials. Athletics personnel will be able to assist with the licensing of PAC-12 footage to commercial entities and students, and we will avoid file duplication and save time on both ends by sharing the footage each party has already accumulated. In a lot of ways the future is looking very good.
- But this detailed modern athletics archive is extremely large, and very little material has been accessioned into Special Collections as of yet. The graph on the right has been extrapolated using the amount of football data generated each of the last four years. In 2012, Athletics accumulated just shy of 1 TB of football, but this year the department had already amassed almost the same amount in only half a season of play. Skip estimates video production for gymnastics in the winter season will be 1 TB – that’s 3 TB for those two sports alone. By the end of this academic year, Athletics will likely have accumulated nearly 12 TB in new footage in the last four years alone.
- And that’s with almost all of these files compressed into H.264 mp4s. Athletics views compression as a necessary evil to allow them to maintain this level of production, especially as broadcast and physical display standards demand video in at least 1080p.
- But even with the compression, the Athletics server has accumulated 48 TB of data, including new files and legacy materials uploaded from MiniDVs and external hard drives, and their digital workspace is almost completely full. This server, a one time purchase by the department, has limited backups and was never intended for permanent archiving. In order for this material to survive, Special Collections must fulfill its duty as the university’s repository.
- That’s where it gets ugly. The Marriott Library’s budget cannot accommodate new digital material on this scale.
- The need for digital space includes not only the videos being taken by the Athletics Department today but also the enormous number of legacy magnetic tapes in Special Collections and the Athletics Department that require digitization for preservation and access. This includes the gymnastics and women’s basketball collections already in our archive. As you can see on the left, we don’t even currently have physical shelving designated for gymnastics.
- And so we come to a crisis point brought on by the high internal and external demand for extremely popular college sports, by advancements in technology allowing for easier production of higher resolution video and the rapid sharing of content, and by the University’s mandate that all of these records be archived.
- Although we do not have a solution, we do have dreams. We are currently planning to submit a budget proposal to the University of Utah President’s office that would specifically allocate the funding necessary for the ongoing preservation of Athletics film. If we succeed, the preservation of these popular materials will draw attention to the archive and may bring about an opportunity to lobby for storage support for other digital collections.
- If we fail in our proposal, we can seek funding from other sources such as alumni, sports fans, and internal and external grants. However, this type of funding would be unlikely to provide the perpetual support the repository really needs.
- We can try further compressing our archival video. Because Athletics is already doing all of their production in H.264, this compression would have to be applied to uncompressed or minimally compressed materials in other AV Archive collections. The library is exploring lossless compression options, but this solution would also only be a stopgap as more and more videos are produced.
- Ultimately, without an increase in budget, we will likely have to start archiving more selectively. Whether or not the University will support the preservation of its complete Athletics institutional record for future generations is something our administrators and legislators will have to decide. And I hope that if they’re moved by sports they might then be moved to preserve other history, too.