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439 4. Rethinking Access and Archives
Less clear-cut than the issues of physical preservation are those surrounding the changing needs of film users.
Increasingly, "preservation" is understood by users and archivists alike to be incomplete without access to the preserved film. But as was evident from the hearings and testimony for Film Preservation 1993, "access" encompasses a wide variety of film uses, including educational study, public exhibition, and commercial distribution.
The principle of wider access to films is one to which everyone can subscribe. In practice, however, there are reasons why access will continue to be selective. Among studios, concerns over piracy remain, and cycles of access and withdrawal are used to promote interest in a given title. Among public archives-which typically hold physical copies of many films to which they possess only certain limited rights-there can be four broad restraints on access to any single work: copyright status; donor and depositor contracts; staffing and funding constraints; and concerns about physical fragility. Public archives must balance access with protecting master film copies.
In rethinking access, the distinction between educational use and commercial exploitation is central. As the enabling legislation for this national plan directs, the recommendations below are intended to promote either wider educational access or public availability for films that, for one reason or another, remain undistributed through commercial markets. These recommendations look, in a sense, both backward and forward: attempting to save what is best in traditional film viewing at the same time that they encourage new delivery possibilities for archives and their users. It is not just nostalgia to believe that the theatrical filmviewing experience promotes, as does little else, an excitement and passion for saving older film. As things stand now, such exhibition is generally confined to a few large cities, and the number of available titles with satisfactory prints is limited. Recommendations 4.1 through 4.4 (as well as the tour mentioned in 4.14) respond to this situation. There are also opportunities to reshape the relationships among archives, scholars, educational users, and rightsholders in light of evolving digital access technologies. Increasingly, such technologies hold the promise of opening archives to off-site use. Recommendations 4.6 through 4. 10 look toward this future.
Rethinking Access and Archives 11