Access and Preservation in the Audiovisual Age

Gerry Bayne: Welcome to The CNI Interviews podcast. I'm Gerry Bayne for EDUCAUSE, and I'm highlighting conversations from the Coalition for Networked Information 2025 spring meeting. The CNI meeting is a venue for technology leaders in higher education, library administration, digital publishing, and research to share and broaden their knowledge of digital information issues. In this episode, I speak with Peter Kaufman, associate director of development at MIT Open Learning, an author of The Moving Image, a user's manual from MIT press. Peter's been a longtime advocate for educational media and preservation. He's worked at the intersection of video scholarship and public access through roles at Columbia University, MIT, and consulting for the Library of Congress at their National Audio Visual Conservation Center. His recent work calls for a rethinking of how we value and preserve video and academic and cultural institutions. I began our conversation by asking him how he sees the role of libraries, classrooms, and other campus spaces and meeting students where they are in an audio visual world.

Peter B. Kaufman: Gosh, when I was in college 400 million years ago, the scene was like this. I would go from where I was living to the library, and the library had everything in it that I did not have. The library was just a kind of Shangri-La. Today, it's kind of the opposite in the sense that a student will be participating in an audiovisual cornucopia of media in the morning, in the night, and probably throughout the day, but they go into a classroom and like as not it's going to be comparatively speaking barren. It'll have no audiovisual material playing in it. It'll have no appeal to the dopamine addiction that all teenagers, all students now seem to be manifesting and on a higher level at universities, the libraries, the labs, even the media centers, many of them are still preoccupied with text or text and image. But the world that we live in is a world of audiovisual media today. So you name it, whatever criteria exists for advancement at a university, whether you're a student, whether you're a faculty member, staff, anything. It doesn't yet include space for audiovisual media production, audiovisual media curation. And what that means is we're still mired in the technology of communication that's now six hundred years old, even though we should be paying a lot more attention to the technology of communication that's 130.

Gerry Bayne: Why do you think that is? Is it that people say changing culture in academia is like trying to turn around a battleship? Is it just the slow moving culture of higher ed or what do you think that is?

Peter B. Kaufman: I wish that we had battleships that we were all sitting on these days. Battleships would be glorious. These are rafts. I don't know what they are. They're turning slowly and often in the wrong direction. Why is this? I think literally audiovisual media has seized our world in a way I describe anyway in the book that's elusive. You're not a hundred percent sure that it's happened, but it's happened. And in fact, the same term was used, no coincidence. I'm borrowing it by Elizabeth Eisenstein, who was the great historian of print writing about print in the 16th century as having seized the European continent, almost elusively. She wrote, we didn't notice it. They didn't notice it. We're not noticing it. Why do I think that is? I think print has been the medium that we've been used to for the centuries now, but in fact, audiovisual media, which is now still again, only 130 years old, needs to be recognized as at least its equivalent.

Gerry Bayne: In the context of your panel, you're talking about highlighting the efforts of sensitive or at-risk materials such as war crimes, testimony or political events. What responsibilities do academic institutions have in preserving and providing access to this kind of content?

Peter B. Kaufman: I think academic institutions, not-for-profit institutions, activist institutions, public media, institutions, archives, museums, libraries, all have a collective responsibility to preserve the most essential texts, to use that term as broadly as possible, and to include audiovisual material, actually tremendous responsibility and we're failing and flailing in it. What's going on with audiovisual material is some of that material is degrading naturally because of the technology onto which it was recorded. Some of that material can't be played back easily because the playback equipment is obsolete. But more to the point these days, 2025 in this era, you have all kinds of people in this country now who are very keen on stripping away our access to materials and deleting materials from the public record. So this is not a technological question. This is very, very sharply a political question. And when you asked me to introduce myself at the beginning, I didn't identify myself as a kind of lapsed sovietologist. I speak Russian, I studied Russian, I studied Russian history and Soviet history, and you name it, college and graduate school. And endlessly one comes across from the imperial past as well as the Soviet past efforts to change and alter and delete like history in different parts of the world, Russia in particular, and the Russian Empire, but all across the Austro-Hungarian Empire, you name it. So here we are today facing an enormous political challenge, and do we rise to meet it or do we not?

Gerry Bayne: I referenced before we started talking the what I'm calling the subscription content culture. How do you think that contributes to the challenge?

Peter B. Kaufman: A lot of media companies want to suggest that our access to materials should be dependent on them and that the materials themselves are so evanescent that it's an extraordinary investment that we need to continue to make. And they're continued to upkeep by paying subscriptions or by paying rental fees and this kind of thing, whether it's Alphabet or whether it's meta or whether it's Bytedance or whether it's these podcast guys. They control the screens and speakers over, which we're getting so much of our information today. That college student that I'm referring to is getting his hits of dopamine through platforms that are owned by these people.

And they have proven, they've proven it with MIT content, they've proven it with others that they may not be the most dependable of stewards for our film libraries or the evidence of atrocities committed in World War II, that the Library of Congress now holds great films that were shot by American, British, Russian cameramen when they came into the camps after the liberations. And where do we leave these things? Do we rely on Google's YouTube to distribute them to us? I think we shouldn't, and I don't think I'm alone. We're only 130 years into this. One hundred thirty years into the print world would put us squarely in like 1570. Not a whole lot of innovation was going on in the late 16th century when it came to print, when you compare it to what's gone on in the past a hundred years. So we are literally at the beginning of our journey with audiovisual stuff. But boy, do we need a wholesale reexamination of what it means to be in the video age in effect. So that's part of the reason why I wrote this book to try and stimulate that.

Gerry Bayne: Sure. Do you have any advice for these institutions in terms of what they should be doing? Some have suggested make many copies, put them on, thumb drives, distribute those to other institutions. So there are many copies that are not manipulable. Do you have any ideas in terms of what a good strategy would be for academia and libraries?

Peter B. Kaufman: I mean, I have some nascent ideas, which I try and unfurl in this thing, and there are many more, good Lord willing, the creek don't rise. It'll go into a second edition. And I mean their political things, their financial things, and their kind of technological things on the political things, which seem to be, in my mind anyway, the biggest stumbling block. Courage is required. Courage is required to stand up when somebody says, "I didn't say that." And you have a copy of the fact that he or she did to show it, to keep it and to put it out there, all kinds of things like that. That's a very generic and perhaps simplified example, but courage is needed, money is needed, and money's, I don’t know, probably 6 percent harder to come by today than it was yesterday and nine and a half percent harder to come by than it was on Friday.

But man, we have to talk about preparing ourselves for a library world that's not necessarily books, books, books and journals and books and magazines and journals and journals and books and magazines. So who is it that's going to support that kind of thing? Well, we have to rely on philanthropy and the government and increasingly, I suppose philanthropy and then technology. It's remarkable how we've switched into this focus. Hey, you did it yourself. Where we're jumping into AI as the critical thing, leapfrogging the lion's share of communications that you and I probably inhale today. Many people, the lion's share of this stuff is audiovisual. So what are we going to be doing about it? We need to be producing the American Historical Review or the Journal of Sociology or Microbiology Today in audiovisual form one way or another. And maybe that's in part what artificial intelligence, as it's called, can help us with going forward. Generative stuff. I mean

Gerry Bayne: The Filecoin Foundation's support of your video work suggests a future for decentralized storage of educational media. How do you envision blockchain or decentralized tech transforming the way universities store share and safeguard audiovisual content?

Peter B. Kaufman: I think that technology is even more embryonic today than the audiovisual world, which has had a century of development behind it, plus, but I think that Filecoin's genius, Flickr Foundation is also a grantee of theirs. Many of the institutions that have been our grantees of the Mellon Foundation are now receiving support from organizations that like Filecoin, that recognize these dependencies that we've established on solutions providers who are potentially fickle and who may be worse than fickle, who may actually be controlled by people whose top level interests are antagonist sake to the main interests of the university project. We need to get away from this. I suppose the most important thing that these foundations are able to do with us for us now is give us a shot in the arm of saying, "Hey, pay attention." The dependencies that you've been fostering and nurturing are rendering the world of knowledge unstable. And today there are enough forces that are trying to have a hand in that, and we need to come together and rethink a whole lot of stuff in the biggest possible way.

Gerry Bayne: Is there anything that you'd like to add that we haven't touched on?

Peter B. Kaufman: No, thanks. Loved your questions. And my hope is that there are more discussions like this. The two of us are having a good time, but there need to be two hundred university leaders thinking about this stuff, and they need to be doing it with the students in the room because it's always students who've changed the world.