Preservando la riqueza audiovisual del Nations Attic: descubriendo 263.663 tesoros

AVMPI: Curating a Diverse and Dynamic Audiovisual Collection

During American Archives Month, we’re highlighting the work of our Audiovisual Media Preservation Initiative in a
series of posts
. This is the second post in the series.
263,663!
293,586!
694,539?
Exactly how many audiovisual collection item films, videos, and audio recordings does the ‘Nation’s Attic’ hold? How can we ‘sunlight,’ ‘give voice to,’ digitize, preserve, make accessible, listen to, and otherwise watch them? Where did they come from? What do they mean?
Still image of a conservator from an unidentified Smithsonian television program. Courtesy of the author’s personal film collection.
These are a mere handful of the thrilling, confounding, and fundamental questions that face the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives’ new pan-institutional
Audiovisual Media Preservation Initiative
(AVMPI) team and its institutional collaborators. As the AVMPI’s Curator of Recorded Media, I join the brilliant and entrepreneurial AVMPI project Coordinator Siobhan Hagan, along with five other soon-to-be-hired federal employees for the exciting and daunting opportunity to provide the American public some answers.
Despite how ‘new’ the Initiative may seem, our fearless Team Leader Alison Reppert Gerber has already won the Association of Moving Image Archivists’ prestigious Alan Stark Award for her 7+ years commitment to laying the groundwork for the Initiative. With generous and strategic fiscal resource commitments from the Smithsonian’s
National Collections Program
, unit-sponsorship from the Libraries and Archives, and as the product of tireless efforts by audiovisual media collections managers, archivists, conservators, curators, historians, and enthusiasts since the 1970s, the AVMPI is the result of dozens of Institutional staff and contractors across more than four decades.
Like Secretary Bunch, my Smithsonian mentor
Dr. Rhea Combs
, and many others in public service at the Smithsonian before me, I am fortunate to return to the Smithsonian for ‘Take 2’ after several years away. As a Media Archivist from 2014-2018 I helped to found the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s media digitization and conservation department, helped build the Oprah Winfrey Theatre’s cinema exhibition facilities, and co-chaired the
Robert F. Smith Fund
and its digitization programs. Since then, I have worked as
Adjunct Faculty
at New York University, as a Fulbright Specialist in Library Science in Mexico City, and as an archival producer for documentary film projects at the
New York Times
and National Film Board of Canada. In my role as AVMPI Curator of Recorded Media researching, selecting, prioritizing, and contextualizing the vast number of audiovisual media at the Smithsonian are primary goals.
Two-inch quadruplex videotapes line the shelves at the Human Studies Film Archive, Smithsonian Institution. Image courtesy of Daisy Njoku.
Collections materials held on certain ‘legacy’ analog…