Nearly ten years since its print publication, The Film Preservation Guide: The Basics for Archives, Libraries, and Museums is yet a worthy resource to bookmark if you or the patrons you serve have even a single reel of film sitting on a shelf. Searchable PDFs of each chapter and complete book are a free download made possible by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. I have overheard many archivists labelling this guide as a “must read” for everyone who works with film collections. In fact, it is required reading for all staff and student assistants who will have their “white-cotton-gloved hands” (NFPF, p. 20) on the films in the collections I manage.
The front matter of the guide indicates that not all possible permutations of film and equipment used over the past century of film’s young history are covered, but rather focuses on the film types and equipment most commonly found in 2004 in film collections. Divided into nine clearly labelled chapters with subtitles included in the Table of Contents, the contents of this basic film guide are obvious and cover topics in necessity of film preservation policies and programmes, film format basics, film decay, handling and inspection, project management, duplication, storage, related legal considerations and access.
To finer granularity of content, this guide, which includes greyscale images, is informational, beginning at the very fundamental point of how to determine if your film gauge is 8 mm, Super 8, 16 or 35 mm, and clues for identifying the film stock (polyester, acetate and nitrate) for handling and storage. Other topics include identification of decay and damage from mechanical to chemical to biological causes and outcomes. In chart form speckled throughout the guide, film archivists are provided with easy-to-read lists and charts such as general and specialized must-have equipment and tools and a question checklist to guide film inspection. If your film needs are beyond basics, sections on film duplication and physical storage containers and their related charts may be of use to you, like options for reformatting film and how storage temperatures affect the life of film and other moving image formats. Considerable real estate in the guide is given for suggestions on cataloguing and metadata options and policies. Considerations about legal issues from copyright, free use, donor agreements and licensing always cause some unrest and ruffled feathers in preservation and use of archival materials; as such, the related sections of this guide set some starting points for continued investigation and debate. The only exclusion in this section that I spotted is that no distinction seems to be made between legal and ethical considerations for protecting privacy of human subjects and patients in unpublished laboratory and research films so often occurring in archives alongside manuscript papers. The body of the guide further offers commentary on community outreach and programming.
After the bulk of the guide, the editorial team presents several helpful appendices (film vendors, suppliers, laboratories), a ten-page glossary of film preservation terminology, selected related bibliography, websites, discussion groups (now ten years old, but with some enduring utility) and a functional index of items more specific than those listed in the table of contents.
Giving theory and practice context are several case studies from institutions and collections of varying missions, sizes and financial resources: Oklahoma Historical Society, University of Alaska Fairbanks, California Pacific Medical Center, Nebraska State Historical Society, University of Texas at Austin, to name a small selection.
The publication was written under the supervision of an Editorial Committee made up of recognized experts in the field. Contents cover best practices, scientific investigation and internationally recognized standards. I am familiar with some of the researchers who made up this team, most notably Jean-Louis Bigourdan of the Image Permanence Institute at Rochester Institute of Technology, who now has some two decades of long-term experiments in film decay under different conditions, such as room temperature, housing technology and chemical treatments. Further, at the time of this publication, the Board of Directors of the National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF) included Chairman Roger L. Mayer and board members Laurence Fishburne and Martin Scorsese, names effortlessly recognizable in the American film industry.
In the October 2013 workshop hosted at the Center for the History of Psychology in Akron, Ohio, Bigourdan gave a day-long film handling and preservation basics session describing the science of film decay and preservation based on controlled experiments in his laboratory at the Image Permanence Institute, much of which had been done since the publication of this NFPF guide. While this guide is tremendously useful for understanding film basics, especially for archivists finding themselves managing a film collection after little formal training in film preservation, it would be prudent for readers to visit the publications of the Image Permanence Institute (https://www.imagepermanenceinstitute.org/) and other laboratories studying the science of film preservation for updates on topics, such as molecular sieves and chemical treatments.
The download is free from the NFPF website (www.filmpreservation.org/preservation-basics/the-film-preservation-guide-download), and though I find the digital version most useful for searching, you can also send a small shipping fee (www.filmpreservation.org/pdfs/The-Film-Preservation-Guide-Order.pdf) and the NFPF will mail you a copy of the guide in book form within the USA or to an international address.
