EVIA Digital Archive Project

The EVIA Digital Archive Project is a collaborative endeavor whose mission is to create a digital archive of ethnographic field video for use by scholars and instructors. Funded since 2001 by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation with significant contributions from Indiana University and the University of Michigan, the Project has been developed through the joint efforts of ethnographic scholars, archivists, librarians, technologists, and legal experts. Beyond the primary mission of digitally preserving ethnographic field video, the EVIA Project has also invested significantly in the creation of software and systems for the annotation, discovery, playback, peer review, and scholarly publication of video and accompanying descriptions.

The primary mission of the EVIA Project is to preserve ethnographic field video created by scholars as part of their research. The secondary mission is to make those materials available in conjunction with rich, descriptive annotations, creating a unique resource for scholars, instructors, and students. Project staff and contributors have created a support system and a suite of software tools for video annotation, online collection searching, controlled vocabulary and thesaurus maintenance, peer review, and technical metadata collection.

The broad scope of the EVIA Digital Archive Project's mission and the technological challenges involved in realizing its goals have required collaboration across multiple institutions, disciplines, and technical fields. From its inception, the Project was founded on ideas shared by scholars across multiple institutions, and as it took shape, more scholars, technologists, librarians, archivists, and legal experts were brought in to further discuss and refine the Project's direction.

The content of the Archive represents the culmination of preservation, annotation, and editorial work. The expansion of the content is ongoing with collections in various stages of completion, some not yet accessible to the public. These items are accessioned and cataloged like any other physical item in the Archives of Traditional Music. Digital files that are either original recordings or preservation transfers from an original tape are stored in Indiana University's Mass Data Storage System (MDSS) and are managed as a partnership between the Archives of Traditional Music, The EVIA Project, and the Digital Library Program at Indiana University. The extensive metadata that is collected about the recordings as part of the EVIA deposition process is stored in a FEDORA repository created by the EVIA Project and managed as part of the Digital Library Program at Indiana.