Jeffrey Lauber, Spring 2018

Jeffrey Lauber, Crowing Rooster Arts, Spring 2018, HFPA

My Spring internship was spent at Crowing Rooster Arts, Inc.—a documentary production company active primarily in the 1990s which now has a rich and extensive collection of raw footage. Under the guidance of Audiovisual Archivist Marie Lascu, I performed a number of tasks supporting the company's efforts to digitize and digitally preserve its raw footage collections across a number of videotape formats, notably Betacam and 3/4" Umatic. My tasks to this end primarily involved creating an item-level inventory of the physical tapes, digitizing their content, and conducting quality control assessments for resultant digital video files. In all, I was able to inventory over 1,400 tapes and digitize 82 (approximately 54 hours of content). Experiences beyond these were numerous, some of which include video deck cleaning, maintenance, and troubleshooting; (re)wiring a video digitization rack; and visiting other institutions to meet their archivists and learn about how their archives operate. Resulting from all of this was not only a significant personal and professional growth through hands-on audiovisual archival practice, but also a feeling of accomplishment at having contributed to the preservation of Crowing Rooster's legacy.