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Abstract
Currently, the Society of American Archivists (SAA) and other similar organizations provide little guidance for archivists working with audiovisual records. For this reason, the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) has been working to develop its own code of ethics to establish a stronger professional identity within the archival profession. Increasingly, audiovisual archivists must look outside the mainstream archival literature, which focuses on text-based records. Most importantly, FIAF and AMIA have worked to develop a code of ethics to embrace the challenges presented in the field of audiovisual archives. While AMIA continues to revise and develop its guidelines, FIAF has developed an ethical standard that distinguishes its code from the SAA's "aspirational, non-enforceable" code. Fritz Lang's seminal film Metropolis (1927) and the subsequent restoration efforts exemplify many of the ethical challenges faced by audiovisual archivists, and it is the case study explored in this essay.
Walter Benjamin laments the loss of the "aura" of the original work of art in his 1936 essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (Benjamin, 1969). Artist Douglas Davis revisits Benjamin's premise in his essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction," suggesting that the mutability of the original has spawned a new era of creativity (Davis, 1995). As digital records quickly replace analog records, archivists are facing new challenges in preserving, describing, and providing continuing access to these new forms of digital multi-media. Traditional archival theory has centered around paper-based records for which archives have physical custody. These records are produced on a stable, human-readable medium. Digital records, however, are technologically dependent, unreadable to the human eye, and do not exist in a physical form. The preservation of these complicated records requires a rethinking of theory and practice and presents ethical challenges for which current codes of ethics provide little guidance.
Moving image and other audiovisual archivists have faced many of these same challenges posed by digital documents through their work with analog media. The myriad formats incorporated under the umbrella term "audiovisual media" are also plagued by obsolescence and technological dependence. In addition, as analog formats become obsolete and information must be migrated and reformatted, archivists face a number of ethical decisions similar to those faced by archives preserving...