Claire Shaffer, Spring 2022

Claire Shaffer, Meredith Monk Archives/House Foundation, Spring 2022

This past spring, I interned at the House Foundation, established in 1971 to “develop, disseminate, promote and preserve” the work of performance artist, dancer and musician Meredith Monk. Since its inception early on in Monk’s career, this nonprofit based near Monk’s home in Tribeca has overseen her extensive visual archive, including filmed performances, rehearsals, television specials, interviews and more.

My roles as an intern were split in two, as I worked both remotely and in person. For my remote work, I added, reviewed, and edited the metadata of records of the digital collection within Collective Access; while I did not work closely with the digital assets themselves, I created collections within CA for each production or project that Monk has created over her career, along with pages for each performance of that production.The goal was not only to create a comprehensive library of every production, event, venue, or personnel related to Monk, but to create relationships between all of these elements. These records and the relationships between them will ultimately come together into an online library of Monk’s work that will be open to researchers. During my in-person hours, I worked with the Foundation's archivist Draye Wilson (MIAP '19) to organize the their extensive physical inventory of magnetic and MiniDV tapes. We also completed an inventory assessment of the Foundation's recent acquisition of tapes from NYPL, noting which duplicate tapes to set aside for deaccession when necessary. Other miscellaneous tasks included constructing a rewind table so that the films in the House collection could be inspected, creating sticker sheets for the inventory process, and researching possible deaccessioning services for the NYPL duplicates.