Sarah Hartzell, Spring 2021

Sarah Hartzell, Wildlife Conservation Society Library & Archives, Spring 2021, NEH

In my internship at the Wildlife Conservation Society Library & Archives, I continued the work that past MIAP interns started on the archive’s film collection. The collection in all includes over 3,000 items, with nearly 700 of them inventoried and inspected. Since I worked entirely remotely, my goal was to migrate the inventory records from AVCC to WCS’s ArchivesSpace instance in preparation for public access. What seemed at first like a simple spreadsheet project quickly became much more complex and, in the end, much more fruitful as I was able to significantly augment the original inventory records with descriptive and technical metadata.

With the existing AVCC records as a starting point, I parsed out various details like the film stock and print generation, corresponding soundtracks and picture tracks, agents (both people and animals), subjects, and locations. Identifying these details sometimes turned into a bit of a scavenger hunt and I spent a good amount of time searching through the New York Times’ coverage of the Bronx Zoo and New York Aquarium in the early and mid-20th century to find out more about notable events and zoo animals that appeared in these films. In doing so, I generated more thorough records that could be mapped to ArchivesSpace’s fields and serve as a descriptive point-of-access to films that are not currently viewable. I learned a great deal through the process about the tools used in archival description and collection management; the challenges and opportunities of introducing audiovisual materials to a more traditional archival system; and the value in collaborating with people with different sources of knowledge.