The Pulse in the Past

The Living Archive is quite different from typical film or television archives, as such archives mostly contain carefully edited video. Over the past four decades, Circus Oz has collected a wide range of video recordings of past performances and other material. The originating source format in the archive is not necessarily the original analogue recording format, as some videos had been copied from another format before they were digitised. Circus Oz also shoots video of rehearsals as an important part of their practice in performance development and training. The metadata provides context to the video recordings held in the archive. In the case of the Living Archive the objects that can be retrieved in the data model include: videos, acts, clips and collections; each object has associated metadata and hypertext links to other objects. In order to enable the flexible deployment of the Living Archive the project team decided to implement the system on virtual machines.