Christine Gennetti, Fall 2019

Christine Gennetti, American Museum of Natural History, Fall 2019, NEH

The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) Library was founded jointly with AMNH in 1869 as part of the original charter granted by New York State. It is one of the largest natural history libraries in the world. I worked exclusively with the unprocessed Ornithology Moving Image Collection. It is a mixed media collection of approximately 790 items, 523 of which were audiovisual materials (film, audio) and 267 of which were photographic materials (prints, slides, negatives), paper materials (logs and note cards), and a few objects. My supervisor was Special Collections and Research Librarian Gregory Raml. The bulk of my efforts centered on processing and stabilizing the collection in an attempt to establish physical and intellectual control of it. In 2012, an assessment and inventory was conducted by MIAP. Picking up from there, I verified that original inventory by assigning unique IDs and labeling the items. I re-inspected and rehoused a small portion of the film collection in archival-quality containers, measured the level of acetate deterioration, and captured additional metadata. Additionally, I created an Inventory Spreadsheet Template with separate explanatory documentation to facilitate records creation in ArchivesSpace. Through the internship I improved my film handling and inspection skills and gained valuable film preservation knowledge by working with compromised audiovisual materials.