Jeffrey Lauber, Crowing Rooster Arts, Spring 2018, HFPA
My Spring internship was spent at Crowing Rooster Arts, Inc.—a documentary production company active primarily in the 1990s which now has a rich and extensive collection of raw footage. Under the guidance of Audiovisual Archivist Marie Lascu, I performed a number of tasks supporting the company's efforts to digitize and digitally preserve its raw footage collections across a number of videotape formats, notably Betacam and 3/4" Umatic. My tasks to this end primarily involved creating an item-level inventory of the physical tapes, digitizing their content, and conducting quality control assessments for resultant digital video files. In all, I was able to inventory over 1,400 tapes and digitize 82 (approximately 54 hours of content). Experiences beyond these were numerous, some of which include video deck cleaning, maintenance, and troubleshooting; (re)wiring a video digitization rack; and visiting other institutions to meet their archivists and learn about how their archives operate. Resulting from all of this was not only a significant personal and professional growth through hands-on audiovisual archival practice, but also a feeling of accomplishment at having contributed to the preservation of Crowing Rooster's legacy.