Research
Regional Media Legacies Project
The Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAP) program situated within the Department of Cinema Studies in the Kanbar Institute of Film & Television in NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts recently embarked on the Regional Media Legacies (RML) project with the appointment of Project Manager, Marie Lascu in April 2019. The RML is provided support for the next three years from the Robert D. L. Gardiner Foundation to train MIAP archivists on the management and care of film, video, audio, and digital media held across Long Island and New York City (Queens and Brooklyn, specifically). The RML project was created because regional audiovisual collections, like the ones we are currently locating in Long Island and New York City, have been historically undervalued and often go unpreserved. The RML project will honor the unique, informative, and often powerful stories that local media can continue to tell. Media made for regional audiences, especially those housed in organizations that lack archival resources or the skills of audiovisual specialists, often constitute what libraries and archives call hidden collections—rare recordings that capture local history and culture in a way that larger and better-resourced media collections often do not. The archival profession and scholarly community now recognize that local television, home movies, the works of independent artists, and region-specific productions tend to document lives and communities that are often invisible to national media and the entertainment industry.
Read More.Privacy in Libraries
New York University (NYU), in partnership with the Library Freedom Project (LFP), a nonprofit organization fiscally sponsored by the Tor Project, Inc., recently submitted a proposal for a two-year Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian project grant to facilitate the use of privacy tools in libraries and their communities through the development of a privacy-focused train-the-trainer program for librarians. Building on their successful shorter programs, the project team plans to construct an extensive curriculum and use it to train geographically dispersed Privacy Advocates, who can then serve as nodes of expertise in their regions by conducting workshops for community members and helping their own libraries become more privacy conscious. Read the proposal's abstract and narrative via the link below.
Read More.Archiving the Websites of Contemporary Composers
Archiving the Websites of Contemporary Composers, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is a collaboration between NYU Libraries, MIAP, and the Internet Archive's Archive-it service for curating preserved collections of websites. This project aims to re-engineer current web-crawlers so that they can collect streaming audio and video, and to collect, preserve, and make accessible the websites of music composers, with sound and visual quality at a level significantly higher than current web archiving standards.
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Training Moving Image Specialists in Libraries (TMISL)
TMISL was made possible by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. This project continued to prepare students for library careers and raise awareness of the important contributions that moving image and sound specialists can make in library settings. Project workshops offered library professionals formal training on audiovisual collection care, assessment, and management.
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Moving Image Specialists in Libraries (MISL)
Funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, MISL engaged a range of stakeholders in discussions on the state of moving image collections, the training and education of moving image caretakers, and the need for moving image preservation specialists in libraries.
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Video at Risk
A partnership between MIAP and the Conservation and Preservation Department of NYU Libraries to test proactive and retrospective approaches to saving unique and rare items held in libraries' circulating video collections. The project resulted in highly-used Copyright Guidlines for libraries, and a model of what libraries should put into contracts for outsourcing video digitization. This project was made possible by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
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Results You Can Refuse: Celebrating 30 Years of BB Optics
MIAP students collaborated with Anthology Film Archives to honor the preservation work of avant-garde filmmaker, preservationist, and current MIAP Adjunct Professor, Bill Brand. This project culminated in a series of film screenings at Anthology Film Archives and a published book of essays contributed by members of the preservation community.
Read More.Preserving Digital Public Television
A five-year collaboration between MIAP, the NYU Libraries, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), and public TV stations, Thirteen/WNET and WGBH. Funded by the Library of Congress, the project led to substantial developments in standards and practices for the preservation of "born-digital" works by creating a prototype repository for digital public television. The project also spawned the American Archive of Public Broadcasting.
Read More.DISASTER PREPAREDNESS AND RECOVERY: PROJECTS AND RESOURCES
Projects, workshops, and resources associated with disaster planning and the recovery of moving image and sound materials.
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