UbuWeb Film

UbuWeb began in 1996 as an online repository for visual, concrete and, sound poetry, but later expanded to embrace all forms of the avant-garde. It includes, among other things:
-An Anthology of Conceptual Writing
-Collection of Online Contemporary Poetry
-A Film and Video Archive
-An MP3 archive
-a whole lot more...
UbuWeb is huge it has tons and tons of digital resources. Unfortunately, most of them appear to be accessible only through browsing. But the collection is amazing if your interested in the avant-garde.

I'm going to blog about the "Film and Video" section, since there is just too much on this site to consider it in it's entirety.

UbuWeb:FILM AND VIDEO

Unfortunately, the selection process for this site is obscure. There is not any clear information detailing why this information has been brought together. There are hundreds of videos to choose from, but I chose the Marcel Duchamp section. This brings you to a video page, allowing you to watch the video straight from a browser or open a new window to play the video in in quick time. The site is good with contextual information about the film, but bad with metadata It does not tell you what the film was originally recorded on, nor any information about the digitization project (i.e. which organization did it, who owns it, etc.) This is the main draw back of the site. It provides a lot of great information and resources, but lacks a lot of "best practice" requirements (including information that would be helpful to serious researchers).

UbuWeb's main goal is exposure through access and in that they succeed. On their "Film and Video" page they discuss the importance of the analog versions of these films and hope that people who get an initial taste of these films will seek them out further through museum and theater attendance. To this end they provide a list of distributors of the films, stating that, "We realize that the real thing isn't very easy to get to. Most of us don't live anywhere near theatres that show this kind of fare and very few of us can afford the hefty rental fees, not to mention the cumbersome equipment, to show these films. Thankfully, there is the Internet which allows you to get a whiff of these films regardless of your geographical location," adding that hopefully the viewer will be"enticed to purchase a high quality DVD from the noble folks trying to get these works out into the world. Believe me, they're not doing it for the money."

As far as copyright is concerned, UbuWeb makes it pretty clear by stating, "UbuWeb posts much of its content without permission, ; we rip out-of-print LPs into sound files; we scan as many old books as we can get our hands on; we post essays as fast as we can OCR them. UbuWeb is an unlimited resource with unlimited space to fill. It is in this way that the site has grown to encompass hundreds of artists, hundreds of gigabytes of sound files, books, texts and videos." Their main concern is access, which is great, but there is no provenance, no digital metadata, no unique identifiers, no way to organize the information consistently. The process is not transparent, which is okay for the casual user, but perhaps not for the scholar.