Mary Jackson, NYU Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, Spring 2019, NEH
My Spring internship was at NYU’s Elmer Holmes Bobst Library (Bobst) in the Collections and Research Services Department. I worked with the Chiapas Media Project (CMP) collection. The CMP collaborated with indigenous Zapatista communities in Mexico to create video and computer workshops with the goal of teaching indigenous filmmakers the skills needed to document their own stories in their community. The collection consisted of nearly 400 audiovisual items from the productions of CMP. I also worked briefly with the approximately 2,300 audiovisual items recently transferred to NYU from the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). The Collection Team’s goal for the CMP collection is to make it accessible to the NYU community and to the general public through Bobcat and Mukurtu, which is a user platform that incorporates indigenous perspectives into record formation and access. My project goals were to complete the collection inventory for CMP, re-house audiovisual items, develop an inventory plan for the NMAI collection, outline CMP preservation priorities, and produce a preservation plan for the audiovisual items in the collection. The collection items I worked with were primarily miniDV along with some Hi8 and Betacam. The collection inventory was already created using AirTable and I entered item-level information for each element including format, stock lengthy, total running time, condition, and technical information that was integral to developing the preservation plan. My professional development goal was to gain hands-on practical experience processing an audiovisual community archive collection including inspection, organization, inventory, cataloging, working with database records, and re-housing of audiovisual items. My internship at Bobst, working with the CMP collection, fulfilled all of these goals. In addition, I was also provided with the opportunity to participate in bi-weekly check-in meetings to troubleshoot issues, refine processes, and in discussions regarding the development of the Mukurtu platform.
