Jeffrey Lauber, New Museum, Fall 2018, NEH
The core project of my semester internship at New Museum was to reformat the museum's MiniDV videotape collection for file preservation. The tape collection documents the numerous public programs, events, and exhibitions of New Museum from roughly 2002 to 2006, and includes important, behind-the-scenes meetings and round tables that are essential to the museum's history. The priority of this project was to transfer as many tapes as possible, starting from the oldest-dated tapes and moving chronologically forward. Due to the real-time nature of video transfer, I was only able to reformat around 75 of the 600+ tapes in the collection. Still, this internship provided me with a valuable opportunity to hone my skills in videotape transfer and various aspects of digital preservation, such as transcoding to create access versions; generating and verifying checksums; and embedding checksums and metadata in files.
Aside from technical know-how, this placement awarded some invaluable experiences in the form of working through technical and logistical issues, as well as an introduction to the museum-archival world.
Jeffrey Lauber interned at The New Museum in Fall 2018.
