The Digital Dance Library Project

Many members of the dance community know that for more than a year—in a team effort—we have been exploring the feasibility of developing a Digital Dance Library of moving images. Our assumption is that the collection could be streamed with controlled access over the Internet, for educational purposes only, through appropriate institutions—typically libraries. That study is now complete.

To all of you who have been interested in this idea, the team sends grateful thanks for your help, your criticisms and concern, your commitment to dance. We have had a remarkable one-year journey, with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, investigating the feasibility of such a resource for scholars, educators, students, dance and arts professionals and dance lovers.

We undertook this study for three related and compelling reasons. The first is the dance field's need for easily accessible moving image materials that would advance understanding of the art form itself and of its significance in dance studies, performance studies, social history, philosophical and aesthetic theory, art criticism and in other applied and academic domains. The second rationale for our work is the recent and growing interest in recording and preserving works of dance. The field benefits greatly from the documentation that film and video advances make possible, and that documentation provides the seed bed for a digital library. The third reason for this study derives from recent advances in broadband and streaming technologies. Until these technologies were well developed, and until more users could access them, direct distribution of moving images through the Internet was less possible than it is today. It was the convergence of these long-standing needs and these recent technological developments that motivated us to study the feasibility of a Digital Dance Library.

We focused on four related and essential issue areas, each guided by a team leader, and each informed by the dedicated involvement of a dozen other professionals who worked with us on a regular basis. The issue areas and our team leaders are: dance content (Sali Ann Kriegsman, independent scholar), technology (Steve Brier, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York), business modeling (Andrew Taylor, The University of Wisconsin-Madison) and intellectual property (Jane Ginsburg, Columbia Law School). Alberta Arthurs, an independent consultant, oversaw the team effort.

The results of our study are summarized in the report that is now being made available. We learned that both the curatorial and the technological concerns involved in the creation of a Digital Dance Library are solvable, more so than we had anticipated. Dance scholars and critics were forthcoming and interested, and largely agreed on the need for such a resource and on the parameters of the content it should contain. The technological requirements for the Library, we discovered, can be met by existing products, skillfully adapted and set in motion for this purpose with appropriate staff and setting. We also learned that the business aspects of the Library, which would be a not-for-profit entity, would not be simple; the business models we produced and the business considerations to be addressed are formidable, especially in difficult financial times. And we learned that the clearing of rights for the Library, from the diverse and wide-spread rights holders in the field, would take time, patience, and instruction about the importance of the resource and the practicality of securing it against misuse. All of these findings are specified in the summary report; much more detail is available in the in-depth reports produced in each of the four issue areas, which can also be sent on request.

We are grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for funding this study. We are specifically grateful to the officers in the Scholarly Communications program for their support and for their sympathetic understanding of the field's needs. We are even more grateful to all of you for the wisdom, the time and information, the commitment to dance and its needs, that you demonstrate on a daily basis and that you shared with us. What a wonderful field!

We hope to hear from you if you have comments or further suggestions for us. The best way to communicate is to address e-mail queries to Alberta Arthurs at aba@arthurs.us.

September 2003