CBC Vancouver archives in danger
The CBC archives is a unique depository of local TV and film. In the vaults of the CBC building at Hamilton and Georgia streets are an estimated 35,000 cans of 16-millimetre film, and 30,000 videotapes.
“It’s the largest collection of film in Canada outside of the Ottawa/ Montreal/Toronto triangle,” said retired CBC archivist Colin Preston. “There’s nothing in the Prairies (like it), there’s nothing in the Maritimes. We’re it.”
But the future of the archive is in doubt, because CBC is going through a digitization process. Material from across the country is to be shipped to CBC’s English headquarters in Toronto, where someone will decide whether it’s worth keeping. If they don’t, it may be tossed.
“I believe that at least 40 per cent, even half that collection won’t even make it out the door, it’ll go right to the dumpster because it doesn’t fit their criteria,” said Preston.
“(CBC has said) we’re only going to digitize stuff that is saleable, complete programs that we can use again. So all these bits and pieces (such as interviews not attached to programs may get thrown out). It’s like a giant mosaic that’s incomplete.
“We don’t know what people will want to study later. We have no notion whatsoever.”
CBC’s head of public affairs, Chuck Thompson, said in an email “if audio and video archival files do not meet the criteria for digitization, we will no longer retain or preserve them.
“Storage space in our archival vaults is limited and we’re applying strict criteria which will help us in our choices to retain digital copies of the items that are of the most significant cultural value.”
As it happens, this Saturday five CBC Vancouver documentaries from the early 1960s will be shown at 2:15 p.m. at the Vancity Theatre. They probably don’t have “significant cultural value” in Toronto, but do in Vancouver. Immigrant Impressions is a 1965 doc about what immigrants think about Vancouver, while 1961’s City Song is a “mood piece” featuring a young girl wandering the city and a folk group performing at the Inquisition coffee house.
“It’s the city seen through the eyes of these folksingers, juxtaposed (with) images of Vancouver that illustrate what they ’re singing about,” said another former CBC archivist, Christine Hagemoen, who put together the program with Preston.
“And then there’s two narrators that have these almost like beat poet vibes. ‘This could be any town, but it’s your town!’ It’s really stream of consciousness, very kind of beatnik.”
The other three docs are vignettes from 1964-65 that follow a bus driver, postman and waitress as they do their jobs. They were done for an hour-long program called The 7 O’Clock Show, but are probably the only thing left from the programs they were part of.
Preston said because they aren’t complete programs they’re probably doomed, unless CBC changes its criteria or lets another archive have them.
The CBC’s Thompson said the CBC is open to donating material to the right bodies.
“We already have shared some of our archival material with Libraries and Archives Canada, provincial and territorial archives, as well as some post-secondary institutions,” he said.
Preston remains skeptical. “One of the big challenges with CBC material is they’re loath to give up the rights to it,” he said. “So they’d rather the kill the baby than let the baby be adopted out.”
Kealy Wilkinson of the Canadian Broadcast Museum Foundation said the museum had been working with CBC on a plan to store its archive in an old Norad underground bunker in North Bay, Ont., “but something changed last fall” and the CBC announced it would dispose of some material after it was digitized.
“They have essentially mistaken digitization for a form of preservation, which it is not,” said Wilkinson. “It’s a form of access, and is certainly a good thing, but you don’t mistake it for what it isn’t. The problem is anything that is digital is insecure and unstable.”