Daniel Finn, Summer 2013

Daniel Finn, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Summer 2013, IMLS

I worked in a new department at the Academy; Oral and Visual Histories Projects. These projects are rare in that they involve working with several departments within the Academy, primarily the Academy Film Archive and the Margaret Herrick Library. As such one is able to gain a lot of institutional knowledge and meet a large number of people doing a large number of jobs. I worked primarily on audio material coming from the Academy Oral History Program, which began in 1989. As many oral history collections are doing, this project is about relocating the traditional point of access from a printed transcript to the audio material itself.

At this early a stage a lot of my experience dealt with setting up new standards for cataloging and intellectual control of the material under different contexts (e.g. the archive and the library have very different standards in place for cataloging). Another large part of the internship was working with vendors who did or will be transferring the audio material. These included Chace Audio in Burbank, CA and the USC Digital Repository in LA. I was able to witness and learn a lot about the transfer process for a large variety of formats, even beyond those that the primary collections contained. Overall I had an amazing experience and hope this will not be my last with the department and the collections I worked on.