practically nothing, unless of course we get in a collection or a production company closes down and offers us all of their material. If every production company in Ireland suddenly decided that they wanted to get rid of their film and just go digital and give over all of their material to us then that vault would fill up very quickly. But if we base it on the pattern of what we've been getting in over the last five years then it will keep us going for the next 35 years. If somebody like Lenny Abrahamson came along and said that they wanted us to take all of his work on film from over the years, and then you got a couple more of those, then the vault would fill up very quickly. We have to be ruthless then in terms of what we take in and make sure that we do really good appraisals to make sure that we're not taking in multiples of material. You have to do an appraisal very quickly when you take in the collection and know that there is no point in keeping 15 copies of the same thing if two of them are excellent. Because you will be able to digitise them anyway. A lot of what we do is actually appraising collections just see what is worth keeping and what isn't. We have an acquisitions policy and as an archivist that's your job you can't keep everything. Otherwise there will be no job for an archivist, you would just throw everything into the warehouse. The first part of an archivist's role is just to sit down and appraise the material against whatever your current acquisitions policy is. And with us at the moment we just don't have the staff or the space to take in rushes unless it's for a very specific purpose like with the Loopline Project. Sé has a lot of really amazing rushes and a lot of interviews with people that didn't make it to the final cut. He shot hours of footage and then cut it down. That's all been taken in as a very specific project. But we can't do that type of project without specific funding because it's not within our normal budget. We need the likes of the Broadcasting Authority to run archiving schemes where we can apply and get €250,000 because that's how much it costs. It usually takes 18 months and taking on 3 or 4 extra people to do the conservation work that needs to go in. That's not something that are ordinary budget can stretch to unfortunately. A recent example is the advertising project that took 18 months before it got up on the IFI player and by the time it got there we were done with it. The difficult bit is getting the public to understand all of the work that has gone in to get to that point.
And what of the YouTube generation, who live their lives in the digital domain and share their material daily on a host of apps and websites?
The YouTube generation don't realise that the stuff they stick on YouTube may not be there in 10 years time, because YouTube may not be there in 10 years time. Because they know nothing else and they trust it will always be there. There's no guarantee of that. It's a business like anything else and you're just assuming that your stuff is going to be there and that is still going to be findable. They are devolving themselves of the responsibility of their own digital content and they didn't think about the preservation of their own digital content. It's part of what we are teaching the students on the MA course in Maynooth that they shouldn't expect their material to be easily accessible in the future, because it may not be. That they need to be responsible for their own digital preservation. It's about how they're going to make sure that that stuff is still available to them in five years time or to your family. Because whatever it is, be it photographs or videos, the question is do you want your family, your grandchildren, to be able to see this, and if you do then you need to have a plan for it. You can't assume that they're going to come across a hard drive and just be able to plug it in into some device and be able to look into your files because they won't be able to. People don't think about it, they are just living in the moment and just sticking them up
and sharing them so easily on the
likes of Facebook or Instagram or Snpachat . But number one you are just assuming that those outlets are going to be there forever which we know from past experience isn't true, especially if you look at Myspace or Bebo. And two they also assuming that whatever format they have that the software and the hardware, that all of that is going to be accessible. But how many of us have things on floppy disks or on CDs or DVDs and half the computers in the country don't have a CD drive anymore. It will be the same with USB and on and on and on. People don't name their files properly. They don't list what's on their different devices. So even if somebody did come across it and there was a possibility of opening it up and looking at it 20 years from now it's probably going to cost them money and time and effort. Why would they bother if they don't even know what is on it. I think people really don't think about it. It's not as simple as your photograph albums or your letters that as long as you leave them somewhere reasonably dry and not too warm or cold then they'll be fine. Digital files aren't human readable so I do worry about the next generation of content. That because of the people who do keep them organised and who do have plans, that we are going to have a very skewed view of what was happening in the world. Because most ordinary people won't have done that. That very particular groups of people will be represented in 50 years, much like the early archival material is all from priests as they were the only ones that cameras that that time and who kept records. Or similar to when sound came in and all of the silent material was gotten rid of because it was no longer relevant. We have a very specific view of what silent film was like because we have so little of it left.
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