Julia Kim, NYU Bobst- Fales Library and Special Collections, Fall 2013
My internship involved processing The Flaherty Film Seminar Collection at Fales Library and Special Collections, located at NYU with supervisor Brent Phillips, the Media Specialist and Processing Archivist. The Flaherty Film Seminar Collection included the entirety of audiovisual records relating to the annual Robert Flaherty Film Seminar series, dating from 1955. Recordings include a veritable who's who in independent international cinema with participants that include: Pauline Kael, Joris Ivens, Ken Jacobs, David Maysles, Shirley Clarke, Charles Burnett, Hollis Frampton, Bruce Connor, William Greaves, Les Blank, Louis Malle, the Maysles brothers, Mira Nair, Satyajit Ray, Agnes Varda, John Cassavattes, Yasujiro Ozu, Pedro Costa, Hollis Frampton, Barbara Kopple, the list goes on and on. The collection also included many ancillary materials such as "Flaherty Israel," Flaherty's Public Television series, and even material of Robert Flaherty's own work and recordings. My task was to process the collection. I re-housed and arranged, and described the approximately 800 items that make-up the Flaherty Seminar recordings, while also taking minor preservation measures such as taping down loose winds and affixing tabs to "non-record" mode. In processing the collection, we were able to also discover several surprise boxes of video recordings of the seminar. In the second half of the internship, I worked extensively with Archivist Toolkit and also learned how to create EAD-encoded finding aids.