Author: svh245

During the Fall 2021 semester, the RML project supported two interns from the NYU Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program. Each intern was hosted by an organization located on Long Island, which includes Suffolk, Nassau, Queens, and Kings counties. The following post is from Alyosha Nowlin, who interned at the R.C. Diocese of Brooklyn.

Inaugurated in April 2019, with the appointment of Project Manager, Marie Lascu, the Regional Media Legacies project (RML) is a program designed to support the training of Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAP) graduate students in the care and management of audiovisual and digital media collections held across Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island, New York. With generous funding from the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation, students and graduates from the MIAP program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts have been assisting a variety of regional organizations in processing and better understanding their audiovisual collections while providing guidance on future care and preservation of these collections. One such institution is the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn Archives, which has previously hosted two MIAP interns under the RML project.

Work at the Diocesan Archives was conducted this term by a third MIAP student, Alyosha Nowlin, who has been continuing organizational efforts begun by previous interns Lindsay Miller and Ben Rubin, refining these processes to assist the archives with future inventory, inspection, and metadata collection. Where Ben Rubin helped advance the inventory, and digitized a number of video tapes using the RML video kit, another MIAP intern, Lindsay Miller, designed an identification system, and assigned unique identifiers to 441 items. Lindsay’s work was performed offsite due to the pandemic, and items were not physically labeled because of remote work restrictions. Because my internship allowed for in-person access, I was able to physically apply labels to these, and over 100 additional items.

Audiovisual collections at the Diocese are diverse and are kept in more than one location. Most items are stored either at the Archives in Brooklyn or offsite at the Immaculate Conception Center on Long Island. Work was done at the Prospect Park location, with many items being brought in for inspection at the Archives office. Materials come from a variety of church-related organizations, including Pastoral Communications, the Public Information Office, and the Superintendent of Schools curriculum media. Other notable collections include original MiniDV video tapes of the Senior Priest Oral History Project and audio tapes of the Point of View: Catholic series, with some early episodes originally recorded on ¼” audio tape for broadcast on local radio. Media formats inspected as part of this internship include audiocassette, ¼” audio tape, Digital Audio Tape, 33 ⅓ RPM vinyl discs, ¾” Umatic cassettes, VHS, and Betacam SP.

To date, over 600 items have been inventoried, labeled, inspected with care, and included in a spreadsheet detailing their condition. Items were organized by collection provenance, and arranged by format. Using the Filter function in Google Sheets, displayed inventory can be modified to include only certain information. For example, users may now look in the mixed-media “POV” collection, and search for material by media type or format…

By degree/type of damage…

By manufacturer…

…and by recommended preservation action, among other criteria, while the search function allows for the rapid connection of a title to its location and unique identifier. New spreadsheet columns were added to previously created inventories, enabling the detailed gathering of metadata based on format. Following up on the valiant efforts of my MIAP predecessor, Lindsay Miller, I am confident that this expanded template will suffice for the future collection of audiovisual metadata at the Diocese.

From the perspective of a media preservation specialist, the most at-risk materials are the audio tapes. First are the ¼” audio tapes, stored on reels, some of which have been subjected to serious damage in playback years before this project. These tapes cannot be inspected accurately without playback equipment; their specific content, besides program and date, are often obscure or unknown; and they show signs of binder degradation upon preliminary inspection. Many audiocassettes are likewise succumbing to the effects of flaking emulsion and their lifespan is significantly limited in comparison with either videocassettes or optical media. Some audio tapes may already be impossible to play, and therefore capture, suggesting that overall, these items are in urgent need of reformatting and digital preservation. Certainly, the audio tape materials encountered in this internship work are in more dire need of preservation than any other format.

While the ¼” audio tapes are in most immediate need of action based on their state of degradation, it was decided, in consultation with the archivist, that the Senior Priest Oral History collection, comprised of MiniDV video cassettes and optical discs, should be selected for its cultural significance and overall unity as a project. The collection totals 139 items, with 54 MiniDV, 77 DVDs, and 8 CDs. Original footage was captured on MiniDV, between 2007 and 2009, and edited content was transferred to optical media formats by a private videographer. Content on optical media is unencrypted, can be easily transferred to digital storage, and for these reasons, was not selected for preservation by an outside vendor. As a capstone to this internship, it has been decided that all 54 unedited MiniDV tapes shall be preserved by a qualified outside vendor. Files will be preserved on redundant storage, and a request for proposals has been prepared to locate an ideal vendor for this project.

In conclusion, this internship has been a wonderful opportunity to apply knowledge gained in my MIAP studies and throughout my prior career as an apprentice archivist. I am grateful for my previous MIAP internship of Summer 2021 at the Bay Area Video Coalition, where I learned many terms that helped me describe the Diocese’s archival media and their status more accurately. Also, my skills with inventory software and spreadsheet optimization have improved substantially. It is hoped that the modified inventory template provided will serve the Diocesan Archives as they proceed with their AV collections inventory, and that future interns will be better equipped to conduct assessments of this large, mixed-media collection.

During the Fall 2021 semester, the RML project supported two interns from the NYU Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program. Each intern was hosted by an organization located on Long Island, which includes Suffolk, Nassau, Queens, and Kings counties. The following post is from Kirk Mudle, who interned at Queens Museum.

For my final internship in the MIAP program, I had the privilege of working with Queens Museum to help preserve and research the 16mm and 8mm motion picture film in their World’s Fair Collection.

Founded in 1972 in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, the Queens Museum is a non-profit institution that presents art exhibitions, public programs, and educational experiences for people in the New York Metropolitan area, and particularly the residents of Queens. The Queens Museum frequently collaborates with local artists and community partners to host public events and performances that address topics such as gender-justice, mental health, environmental justice, youth enrichment, gun violence prevention, and LGBTQ+ activism. While Queens Museum is deeply concerned with the contemporary issues of its constituents, they are also dedicated to creating opportunities for researchers and artists to reexamine and interrogate the history of New York City through long-term exhibitions, including their New York World’s Fair Collection. 

The Queens Museum’s history is inextricably linked with the 1939-40 and 1964-65 New York World’s Fairs. The Museum was once the New York City Building, which was built to house the New York City Pavilion for the 1939-40 World’s Fair. After temporarily serving as the headquarters for the United Nations General Assembly between 1946 and 1950, the building reprised its role as the City’s official pavilion during the 1964-65 World’s Fair. 51 million visitors attended the second Fair, which ran over the course of two six month summer seasons and hosted 140 pavilions representing 80 nations, 24 US states, and over 45 corporations in a grand celebration of commercialism and capitalism couched in the utopian theme of “Peace through Understanding.” This theme was symbolized by a 140 foot high, 900,000 lb. stainless-steel model of the Earth called the “Unisphere” that still stands directly adjacent to the Queens Museum. The Queens Museum preserves the history of these two exhibitions through its collection of 10,000 objects related to the 1939-40 and 1964-65 World’s Fairs.

Advancements in audiovisual technology played a major role at the World’s Fairs: National pavilions and pavilions sponsored by industry leaders including Ford, General Electric, Pepsi Cola, and Kodak produced multimedia installations that combined live performances, film, and animation, and the World’s Fair Corporation relied heavily on the moving image as a means to promote the event. The Queens Museum has acquired approximately 100 audiovisual items through donations from Fair attendees, private collectors, and figures directly related to the World’s Fairs. These items represent a wide variety of formats spanning the history of 20th-century recording technology, including 16mm and 8mm motion picture film, optical disks, U-Matic and VHS tapes, audio cassettes, phonograph records, and open-reel audio tapes. In terms of content, they range from home-movies, documentaries, newsreel footage, and promotional, industrial, and corporate-sponsored films—all of which provide unique insights into the events.

In 2017, the Queens Museum received a large donation from Pam Tonucci, the heir of Hugo A. Seiler, the Director of Radio and Television Operations for the 1964-65 World’s Fair. This donation consisted of Seiler’s personal archive of World’s Fair mementos and included a total of 37 16mm films, 14 photographic slides, 12 open reel audio tapes, and 3 boxes of assorted print materials. While the print items were accessioned and cataloged at the time of donation, the Museum did not have the resources or expertise to process the audiovisual materials. As such, most of the films sat dormant in their original rusting film canisters and degrading shipping containers for years (and in some cases decades), which only served to accelerate their decay and put them at even greater risk. This changed last Spring thanks to the incredible work of my colleagues in the Regional Media Legacies (RML) program. Between January and of August 2021, RML intern Ana Salas and Research Fellow Robert Anen conducted the first assessment of the AV items in the Museum’s collection and performed mold remediation on several of the most at-risk films.

Last Fall, I picked up where Robert and Ana left off to continue inventorying and rehousing the 16mm and 8mm films, and began researching their content, origins, and history (also referred to in the archival world as their “provenance”). I used the film rewind bench Ana built and the RML Film Inspection Kit to inspect each film, attach new leader, repair any severely damaged or deteriorating splices, wind them onto new cores, and placed each into polypropylene canisters—all preservation supplies and equipment the Museum purchased per Robert and Ana’s recommendations. During the rehousing process, I confirmed or updated the metadata in the existing inventory while taking pictures and notes on the content of each film. I paid particular attention to important narrative landmarks, such as the particular World’s Fair pavilions, attractions, and historical figures featured, and noted any information related to their production, provenance, and any potential intellectual property concerns. After gathering this information, I wrote summaries of the films for eventual implementation into the Museum’s Collection Management System, Collection Space, and added notes to the collection spreadsheet about the status of potential rights holders.

I would be remiss not to mention some of my challenges during this project. This was my first time working with film outside of the safety of the MIAP film lab or classroom, so I was initially very intimidated by the idea of handling films this old, fragile, and potentially rare. This was where the support from my supervisors Lynn Maliszewski (Archives and Collections Manager at Queens), and Marie Lascu (Project Manager for RML) proved vital. Both Lynn and Maire exercised seemingly limitless patience with my questions and concerns, and never hesitated to offer advice or connect me with the resources necessary to conduct the work.

Before this internship, I was also mostly unfamiliar with the World’s Fairs. Aside from several childhood visits to the recreations of “It’s a Small World” and the “Carousel of Progress” at Disneyland in Orlando Florida, and a grainy photograph of my mother and grandparents visiting the 1964-65 Fair during the summer of either 1964 or 1965, I had almost no knowledge of the significance of the World’s Fairs or the role they played in shaping the landscape and culture of New York City and the United States. This is once again where Lynn’s expertise and extensive knowledge about these events and relevant information sources became so important. On multiple occasions, she pointed me in the right direction to solve some of the more confounding mysteries about where these films came from, who created them, and their uniqueness. This led to several exciting discoveries, including an early industrial film from the late 1930s that describes the election of Queens Borough president George U. Harvey and the expansion of the borough’s infrastructure, as well as a film directed and written by Hugo A. Seiler himself about the nuclear threat to America posed by the USSR featuring interviews with Colonel Raymond S. Sleeper, nuclear physicist Dr. Edward Teller (known as “the father of the hydrogen bomb”), and United States Air Force general B.A. Schriever. 

In the final weeks of my internship I received a crash course in grant writing. I shadowed Lynn and Raphael Miles, Institutional Giving Manager at Queens, while they put together an application for the Council on Library and Information Resources’ (CLIR) ninth Recordings at Risk grant program. Based on my research during the semester, I helped select specific films that best fit into CLIR’s criteria: those which were at most at-risk, had content that was the rarest and least accessible, or had minimal privacy and intellectual property concerns. I created an updated inventory specifically for the application that contained technical, condition, copyright, and content descriptions for selected films and corresponded with several vendors to receive estimates for digitizing the films.

Reflecting on my time at Queens Museum, I can say confidently that my work will contribute to the Museum’s ability to preserve and make these films accessible to researchers and artists interested in the lasting legacy and consequences of the New York World’s Fairs. The experience also allowed me to grow as an audiovisual archivist in several ways. Not only am I far more comfortable handling delicate film, but I also gained an even greater appreciation for the archivist’s role as a researcher. Preservation does not just involve having the technical knowledge to care for the physical embodiments of cultural artifacts. It also requires an understanding of the social and cultural contexts surrounding their creation, how they were experienced in the past, and how they could be experienced in future. This information is essential in order to both describe collections so that they may be discovered by users and to advocate for their significance as pieces of history.

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.