The House Foundation for the Arts/Meredith Monk Foundation
For my Spring 2023 internship, I was assigned to The House Foundation for the Arts/Meredith Monk Foundation, working under the general supervision of Interim Executive Director Sarah Lerner with the archive collection of Meredith Monk.
For my internship, the focus was on an extensive collection of mini-DV tapes ranging from approximately 2006 to 2016, most of which were related to Monk’s educational workshops and seminars that had been recorded onto digital video for the participants to view at a later date. Using the open-source tool Vrecord and a recently acquired tape deck, I was assisted by MIAP alumni Andreas “Draye” Wilson in the process of digitally capturing the signal recorded onto the tapes for the purposes of developing a complete archive of Monk’s work for later use.
I was able to digitize 124 tapes over the course of my internship, with most remaining in good condition. Due to a stickering system developed by Wilson prior to my arrival, the tapes already possessed unique identifiers and simply needed to be generally inventoried/digitized and their technical condition noted, along with other metadata such as duration, date, and titling on the case or DV tape itself.
My other main responsibility during my internship was learning about the platform CollectiveAccess, which was being used to form an extensive database of all of Monk’s archived works. I was given JSON files by Wilson, which contained metadata related to concerts and other recordings related to Monk. The metadata and relationships from these files were inputted into the database, along with cleaning up identifiers to make the database easier to navigate.