During the Summer 2021 semester, the RML project supported two interns from the NYU Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program. Each intern worked with the RML Fellows to assist with select collection work from partners located on Long Island, which includes Suffolk, Nassau, Queens, and Kings counties. The following post is from Ben Rubin, who worked with the Coney Island Museum, R.C. Diocese of Brooklyn, and DeSales Media for the latter half of his Summer internship.
For my summer internship, I interned with NYU’s Regional Media Legacies project, which is funded by the Robert D.L. Gardiner Foundation. Through the RML project, I had the opportunity to work with two iconic New York City nonprofit institutions: The Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn (in particular the AV collection of their communications branch, DeSales Media), and the Coney Island Museum. For both organizations, I was tasked with inventorying a selection of their audiovisual collections with the end goal of creating a running list of what items they have, what those items contain, and what challenges they may face in terms of preservation. Although both organizations required a similar baseline for starting the internship, I had to examine and inventory very different collections, both in terms of content and medium. As such, in this blog post, I will be tackling each organization separately, before concluding by talking about the experience as a whole.
Coney Island Museum
The Coney Island Museum is the only accredited institution focused solely on the preservation and interpretation of the history of the island. Although the Museum is relatively new (founded in 2014), it still claims an impressive array of artifacts, photographs, and records on Coney Island’s history (see Figure 1 for what the inside of the museum looks like). All of this is in keeping with the stated mission of its parent organization, Coney Island USA (founded 1980) to “defend the honor of American popular culture” by preserving the history of Coney Island. This is done not only through the museum, but also through educational programs targeted toward local youth groups, as well as collaborations with other academic institutions in the hope of further disseminating Coney Island’s history.
For the internship, I had two goals regarding inventorying the Museum’s collection of videotapes: the first one was determining what the tapes might contain and what damage they’ve incurred over the years; the second one was to ascertain if any of the tapes contained footage of or information about Coney Island USA’s other major project, the Mermaid Parade. This event is an annual art parade, started in 1984 by Dick Zigun, who also founded Coney Island USA. The nautical-themed parade has grown in both size and popularity since it first began, with an attendance numbering as high as 800,000. The parade is known for its camp atmosphere and quirky nature, with the public being encouraged to “bribe” the Parade by donating $200 to become a judge at the Parade’s beauty pageant. The Parade has become so well known in recent years that celebrities have begun to be chosen as the Parade’s “King Neptune” and “Queen Mermaid,” including Harvey Keitel, Queen Latifah, Lou Reed, and Debbie Harry.
All told, I had to inventory over 120 items in the Coney Island collection, consisting mostly of VHS tapes but also including other formats such as compact audio cassettes and Betacam SP videotapes. Due to time constraints and equipment challenges, my work focused mainly on gathering metadata from the physical tapes (information on cases and cassettes) themselves, rather than from reviewing video content. Most of the tapes had at least one or two physical issues that made inventorying them somewhat challenging – for example, some of the tapes had no label on them indicating what their title was. The lack of label information and inability to review tape content resulted in metadata gaps in the inventory which will need to be added to at a later date. On the other hand, I came across at least one tape where I was able to record plenty of metadata just from looking at the tape’s sleeve since the tape was a VHS copy of the 1991 documentary Coney Island by Ric Burns. The tape itself is unplayable because of a large crack in the middle of it.
For Coney Island, as well as the Brooklyn Diocese, I used a similar system for inventorying the items: a spreadsheet based on a general template the Regional Media Legacies project uses with all of the organizations it works with. This spreadsheet contains fields for various types of metadata that can be gathered from the many items, including technical metadata (ex: how much footage can be stored on a VHS tape), descriptive (ex: the title and/or brief description of the contents of the tape), and administrative (ex: the date the VHS was originally recorded). All of this combines to create a fuller picture of what is on the tape, and how it should be preserved.
Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn
The Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn has, by contrast, a much longer history than Coney Island USA, having been established in 1853. DeSales Media, founded in 2001, serves as the communications branch of the Diocese, both internal and external, and oversees most of the Diocese’s media outreach. Since it has taken control of the Diocese’s television station, it has amassed a substantial archive of audiovisual materials of different sources and mediums, from audio cassette tapes to Betacam recordings of broadcasts. In my case, I was going through their collection of 16mm films, most of which dated from the 1960s and 1970s. Many of these were instructional materials, such as educational short films shown to students across the Diocese’s large network of schools. There were also occasional television recordings. For example, one of the films was a recording of a segment from The Ed Sullivan Show where Michelangelo’s Pieta had been brought over temporarily from the Vatican for the 1964 World’s Fair.
For this internship, I had four crates full of 16mm films of varying lengths (usually between 10 minutes and 30 minutes). My workstation was in the basement of the Diocese main office, where the Diocese’s general archive is located (note that the general archive is a separate entity from DeSales). My assignment was to go through all of the films, record whatever useful metadata I could glean from physical examinations onto the spreadsheet, and briefly describe any physical damage the films might have incurred over the years. The tapes themselves varied greatly in terms of condition, with some being in remarkably good condition for their age, while others having most of their color faded away due to chemical decay; some of the acetate reels were even starting to develop vinegar syndrome, a chemical process that causes acetate films to decay more rapidly than normal. Whenever I came across a serious issue with the film, whether it be physical or chemical, I made a note of it in the spreadsheet.
My supervisor from DeSales, Kate Mulvay, reviewed the spreadsheet at the end of every day to monitor progress. We also frequently contacted each other throughout the day to discuss interesting finds, or so I could receive clarification on what I should do in specific situations. For example, at multiple points throughout the internship, I came across several reels where the film had been cut in half, either because of a tear in the celluloid or because of a botched splice that was done years ago (see the photo below for what that looks like). I asked Claire Fox, my supervisor from RML, whether I should try to tape the two halves together, and she recommended that as long as I documented the action in the spreadsheet and only used archival tape it would be a suitable short-term solution. Likewise, a number of the films showed signs of vinegar syndrome, a form of chemical decay wherein acetic acid gas is produced as the film breaks down, which can in turn accelerate deterioration in neighboring films. In these cases, I wrote down what symptoms the reel was exhibiting, and recommended that it be segregated from the rest of the collection until thorough testing could be performed.
Both internships have been valuable on many fronts. First, and perhaps most importantly, they have allowed me to apply the skills that I’ve been developing during my graduate studies in a real-world setting. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, most of our training and coursework during the first year, as well as our internship experiences, have been virtual, often requiring students to work on physical inventory projects based on photographs rather than the collections themselves. To be able to physically handle the items in a collection and assess the condition firsthand has brought my understanding and capabilities to a new level. My experience working with organizations that are so integral to their communities has also opened my eyes to how important these types of institutions are, and has reinforced my dedication to the importance of maintaining and preserving regional collections, something that interests me as a future career path in my journey to become a film archivist.