The Hollywood branch of ASIFA, the International Animated Film Society, is creating an Animation Archive online. Their blog about the project, along with many digitized items spanning images, audio and video can be found on Blogger. At first I thought that the blog was the archive- which would be extremely weird. Why put the archive on Blogger when ASIFA-Hollywood has a website? I had to dig pretty far into the blog entries to discover that the blog is not the archive, just a temporary way of providing access to materials they have digitized while they continue to build financial support for the project. The range of material that will be part of the Animation Archive is very broad. In addition to cartoons, there are illustrations from books and magazines, old drawing manuals, pinup calendars, oral histories and more. Obviously, much (if not most) of the digitized material is not in the public domain. ASIFA is putting it up anyway and invoking fair use. In the terms of use section, users are specifically prohibited from putting Animation Archive cartoons on YouTube et al., although I have to wonder how easy it is to enforce that.
The quality of all of the digital objects on this site seems impeccable but no technical specs are provided. There is a link to ASIFA's page on Film Preservation, which affirms their mission to preserve all their cartoons as high-quality 35mm prints on safety film, a noble but expensive goal. I also spotted something that said they're doing their transfers to film using the equipment at UCLA's Film and Television Archive. The cartoons I watched on this site were far,far better looking than any I've seen on the Internet Archive. As far as metadata is concerned...there's virtually none. They are building an animation database which will contain "biographies of artists, filmographic info and media files." Currently it is possible to look for digital objects with a simple Google search within the blog, just using keywords. Steve Worth, creator of the archive, is described on Wikipedia as an animation producer and historian. It seems to me that his foremost concern is providing access and he is not as worried about nerdy things like metadata and data migration as someone in the library or archival professions would be. This may turn out to be fine as far as the Animation Archive is concerned, only time will tell.
Even the drawing-impaired like myself can find a lot to look at in this blog/archive. The illustration above is from a book of fairytales that was owned by a friend of my parents', which I loved to look at when I was a child. I had forgotten all about it and it was so sweet to rediscover it in the Animation Archive. The primary audience for the Archive, however, will be professional and student animators and serious collectors, i.e. people who are really passionate about preserving the art of hand-drawn animation.
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