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Bernhard Markus
2006-03-01 - 2007-02-28
Archival Project: The Film Archive of Human Ethology
Archival Project: The Film Archive of Human Ethology - Preservation and Adaptation for Future Scientific Use In the present project the material of the Film Archive of Human Ethology in Andechs, Germany, shall be both preserved and its access facilitated for future scientific use. The archive contains film, photographic and object material of six so-called traditional societies with different subsistence strategies, being recorded and collected over a period of almost 40 years. It is the most extensive documentation of human behavior worldwide. All film sequences of the archive have previously been indexed in a database. Although the database is extensive, its present condition is not prepared for effective and individual scientific use. It is necessary to improve the usability of the database by optimizing its design and by extending the repertoire of categories to allow both interdisciplinary and also future public use. Moreover, further parts of the archive, the object and photographic collection, shall be digitized, described in detail and also integrated in the database. The aim is to link all corresponding information of the various material within the database to allow a more effective, coherent and complete scientific analysis. In addition, for the reason of preservation and to allow future analyses with latest techniques, a transfer of the film material to state-of-the-art media is planned. The accomplishment of this project is crucial, because only after the database is adapted and extended, the full potential of the archive will become available for interested external scientists. In conclusion, apart from continuative preservation, it is aimed to bring the whole archive to a condition that extensive analysis with latest techniques of the whole material is feasible for scientists from different fields without using any original material.