gor[b] Paul Gorbould: Words and Pictures

Of Dilligence and Dullards

God bless archivists and librarians.

For all the stereotypes about them, I'll say this: they hold getting things right as a sacred trust. As a journalist (and a pedant) I appreciate that.

Last week, CBC lost one of the wonderful archivists that toil behind the scenes to keep the broadcaster on air, and keep its millions of tapes for future generations. Andrew DeNew, a media librarian who helped us establish the CBC Digital Archives site, passed away at age 38.

In addition to being an interesting and compassionate human being and a good friend, Andrew was the consumate archivist. He was a collector of of oddities and of history, able to identify almost anything, from the model of a jet aircraft to the flag of an obscure island nation, from a mile's distance.

Andrew's memorial was held today. A lot of people miss Andrew dearly, and I feel odd writing about him now - I don't know how he felt about blogs, and whenever I write about my friends, I try to ask permission first. Lord knows, I wish I could do that here. I wish.

But I also think that Andrew, as a keeper and treasurer of history, would have understood the desire to record it, regardless of format. And I think he'd particularly enjoy the story I want to tell.

Actually, it's a story he liked to tell.

For the past several years, Andrew worked in CBC Toronto's visual resources department, which records, catalogues and files the tapes for most of CBC's national English television programs. It takes a special kind of person to be a media librarian. You can spend days shotlisting news items in boring obscurity, knowing that some of these items will never again see the light of day. Then suddenly there's a deadline-harried reporter in your face, urgently demanding "that shot of the guy with the beard" - and you'd better know what he's talking about, and get it in his hands right quick.

Andrew was one of those guys who always knew who the guy with the beard was. And he could shotlist a tape like nobody's business.

Nobody was more diligent, or paid more attention to detail. He catalogued every scene and camera angle, every make and model of plane, train and automobile, plus what people were wearing and their posture while wearing it. Overkill, perhaps, but as I've learned from working on the Digital Archives website, a good item without a good record isn't much good at all.

But back to the story. Andrew frequently had to catalogue reports from the Middle East, a job he relished because he was - of course - an expert in all things military. His shotlists read like a screenplay. Here's an excerpt from the record for a stock shot tape from a Michel Cornier piece on Afghanistan (Oct. 15, 2001):

/ms/ 10:04:43 heavily laden donkeys climb up rocky path, several perspectives
/ms/ three soldiers in uniform march out on patrol from mud outpost
/ms/ several soldiers drinking coffee and lounging near frontline SOT
/mcu/ soldier talks into hand radio SOT
/ms/ soldier walks on spine of mountain, see lovely but desolate scenics in bg

(For those who don't know, "ms" is "mid shot", "mcu" is "medium close up", "SOT" is "sound on tape" - see here for more.)

The cardinal rule in record keeping is objectivity and neutrality, and Andrew certainly followed the rules. But this particular tape irked him. The piece focussed on Afghan troops who clearly did not meet Andrew's standards of military decorum; he loathed unprofessional behaviour, and such behaviour in the military was beyond the pale.

Andrew fought back, slipping some very uncharacteristic editorializing into the record:

"/cu/ bubbling cauldron of vile looking soup"
"/ms/ man holds RPG rocket launcher rather casually next to Tajik comrade with AK-47 assault rifle"
"/ms/ several soldiers in line, one with RPG, commander picks nose then calls them to attention"

He did, too. I pulled the tape; here's a screen shot:

Finally, Andrew made the conscious decision to inject an entirely subjective plural noun that would become the stuff of (archivist) legend:

"/mcu/ dullards in uniform stand sort of at attention"

Dullards. Dullards! How often do you see that word used in a historical record?

Never, at least at CBC. But Andrew mischeviously slipped it in there, and it remains the only instance of the word in a database containing more than 50 years worth of records.

Funny thing happened, though. In future pieces about the sorry state of the Afghan military, that shot was frequently requested (becoming, literally, the guy with the beard.) And how do you search for that shot among the tens of thousands of shots of the Afghan military?

You search for "dullard", of course.

Andrew was rather pleased with this. Obviously, injecting unique and arcane terminology does not make for a sustainable cataloguing system, but just this once... why not? How else do you find a needle in a haystack?

I find this lesson rather valuable. I've spent the last two weeks working on a very complex, neutral and standardized system for categorizing all the clips on the Digital Archives site that Andrew and I worked on. Taxonomy, they call it.

But we're also exploring more casual taxonomies, such as tags - systems that make sense to the user. That's known as folksonomy (how folks classify things.) We probably won't create a subcategory called "Dullards" - though I can think of a few good candidates - but you can bet people would click on it. And probably find what they were looking for, too.

I'm glad this little gem slipped into the mighty databases of the CBC-TV archives, and I'm glad it's still there as a memento. Somewhere, Andrew is having a well-earned chuckle, and making a pun about the inevitability of death and taxonomy. We folks appreciate it, Andrew.