Madeline Smith, Center for Constitutional Rights, Fall 2019, NEH
My Fall 2019 semester internship was the the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a progressive non-profit legal advocacy organization based in New York City. Under the supervision of Grace Lile, the Director of Operations at CCR, I performed an assessment and complete inventory of CCR's audiovisual materials housed at NYU's Tamiment Library and a partial assessment of CCR's audiovisual materials housed at CCR's office. The Center for Constitutional Rights' audiovisual collections comprise unprocessed, minimally inventoried, or uninventoried items. These items are primarily VHS and audiocassette tapes, but formats also include Umatic, Betamax, Betacam, DVD-R, CD, S-VHS, MiniDV, 3/4" Umatic, and 3.5" floppy disc. The goal with the collection assessment and inventory of CCR's audiovisual items at Tamiment was to identify the content and its significance to CCR's history and to prioritize items for preservation through NYU Libraries Preservation Lab. Interning at the Center for Constitutional Rights afforded me the opportunity to contribute to preservation efforts aimed at safeguarding narratives of social justice movements and communities under threat. I believe working with material of a sensitive nature and determining levels of significance to an organization’s history can be incredibly challenging. The sensitive, yet decisive manner in which significance and priority for preservation is determined is an incredibly usefully skill and is an important skill to have moving forward in my career working in cultural institutions.
Madeline Smith interned at Center for Constitutional Rights in Fall 2019.
