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The "Share That Knowledge!" project was first presented at FIAF's 2018 Congress in Prague. This article describes its progress and outlines some of the scenarios it has recently investigated.
In the back of the film vault in the Austrian Film Museum (AFM) there are film cans everybody knows about, but nobody has touched for decades. These cans do not have identification numbers, the usual archival labels, or database entries. At the beginning of the 1990s, these 300+ reels of 35mm film were deposited at the AFM by a laboratory where they had been left by several production companies and never reclaimed. Because of uncertain and complicated rights status, no official deposit agreement was ever made for the material which joined a backlog of collections waiting to be processed - inspected, catalogued, and properly archived - at the Film Museum. As time passes, there is a risk that knowledge necessary to understand this deposit, such as the rights status of different elements, any technical details, and what informed the AFM's decision to acquire this material, might slowly be lost. This knowledge might be with the people involved at the time of deposit, including the archivist, laboratory employees, and the filmmakers themselves. However, the archivist has retired, the laboratory closed down this year, and some of the original production companies no longer exist. Today's archivists are left with only basic information - but mainly with questions.
One can think of several reasons why knowledge has not been successfully passed on in this case. First, it has remained implicit or, in Michael Polanyi's term, tacit, since not everything has been documented or articulated.1 Some questions were never answered at the time of deposit and the information has therefore not been documented. At the same time, the archivist in charge might not have seen the necessity to articulate her knowledge: she was then the only person involved, and she knew the why, the what, and the whereabouts of this deposit. On top of that, standards for documenting provenance information have changed over the past few decades and are perhaps now more thorough than they were. Furthermore, with time, knowledge surrounding this deposit becomes less and less accessible not only because the laboratory and some of the production companies have...