“I’m a new-fashioned librarian,” says Jerome McDonough, whose Ph.D. in library science from Cal Berkeley is backed by expertise in such technologies as metadata schemas and the XML and SGML markup languages. In 2000 McDonough became head of New York University’s digital library unit and before long his team was applying Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro and other tools to accomplish an ambitious project: digitally capturing a rich trove of videotaped political theater from Central and South America.

McDonough’s team worked with NYU’s Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics — a consortium of academic and cultural institutions from throughout the Americas that study the intersection of performance and social-political life — to produce high-quality digital masters of taped theater, dance, art, poetry, spoken-word and music events that give voice to political views. The project, says McDonough, is intended “to preserve and make available on a global basis these extraordinary cultural documents.”

“There’s a growing number of scholars whose work depends on video documentation. But videos don’t last very long. Without the digital library, these performances are not only inaccessible for study, but they’re in danger of disintegrating.”

The digital performance library will be permanently archived at NYU and available to academics and the public free via a searchable interface on the Hemispheric Institute’s website. “We’re producing both DVDs for in-house library use and MPEG4 streaming editions for the web,” explains McDonough. He estimates that an initial batch of content will be posted on the site in about 18 months; new video will be added as it is digitized.

Preserving Ephemeral Expressions

Social performance like theater and dance is, by nature, ephemeral: It occurs in one time and place and survives as a resource only if captured on video. That’s a red flag to librarians like McDonough, who think deeply about issues of preservation and access. “There’s a growing number of scholars whose work depends on video documentation,” he notes. “But videos don’t last very long. Without the digital library, these performances are not only inaccessible for study, but they’re in danger of disintegrating. So NYU wanted to bring them out of their remote locations, make them available to academics around the world and preserve their content for future generations.”

Stacks of videotapes awaited the project’s start — McDonough estimates his initial batch at about 700 hours of performance. Highlights include archives from these artists:

• C.A.D.A., a group of activist artists who used performance to challenge the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile.
• Liliana Felipe and Jesusa Rodriquez, called “the most powerful woman in Mexico” by The New York Times. Their cabaret showcases performers addressing urgent political issues. Rodriquez’s career exemplifies the degree to which live, embodied art can interrupt highly censored spaces of opinion-making, including the media.
• Guillermo Gomez-Pena, a renowned Chicano performance artist in the United States whose work addressed migration, border culture and the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
• American Indian Community House, which has videotaped 15 years of performances including Spider Woman, the Coatlicue Sisters and other major Native American artists.

To be included in the library, works are assessed for their intellectual and artistic importance, their vulnerability and their distribution in terms of geographic area, performance genre and period of production, among other criteria.

First Push into Foreign World

The project took McDonough and his team into unfamiliar territory. “This was our first push into serious video preservation,” he acknowledges. “There was a definite learning curve we had to scale. We were going around saying, ‘What’s luma? What’s chroma? What are 4:2:2 and 4:4:4?’ We didn’t understand any of it. We had to learn basic video concepts and then all the advanced details about the production workflow.”

Fortunately, the digital library team had a valuable resource close at hand. “We had a leg up because NYU has its own TV station, which runs the cable system for all the student dorms,” notes McDonough. “So there was a fair amount of in-house experience, where we could see how real video work is done. Still,” he adds, “I have to say that for those of us who were used to dealing with still images, the world of video was very foreign when we started.”

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