Madeline Smith, Summer 2019

Madeline Smith, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Summer 2019, NEH

My Summer 2019 internship was at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in Los Angeles, California. Established in 1961, LACMA is the largest museum in the western United States. It is an encyclopedic museum, meaning it collects artworks from all around the globe, spanning the history of art, from ancient times to the present. Under the supervision of the Digital Preservation Manager Joey Heinen and the Media Collections Manager Morgan Kessler, I performed a number of tasks aimed at the preservation and management of LACMA's rich Time-Based Media (TBM) art collection. The creation dates of the artworks in this collection span multiple decades. Tasks included: condition checking TBM incoming acquisitions by using QCTools, MediaInfo, and real-time viewing; migrating digital artworks from their original carriers to LACMA's on-site preservation storage; preparing a selection of LACMA’s digital TBM collection for LACMA’s long-term preservation system, which included creating upload sheets and normalizing formats; surveying incoming born-digital archival AV in preparation for long-term preservation; researching documentation procedures in conservation and registration, specifically Iteration Reports for TBM works; and assisting conservation with research on LED lightbulb replacements for an installation artwork with time-based media components. During my summer internship, I also was able to meet and shadow multiple LACMA employees who worked in various other departments at LACMA and learn about how a large museum structures, organizes, and divides up the multitude of tasks required to allow such a large museum to function successfully and seamlessly. This internship afforded me the opportunity to gain hands-on experience working with time-based media art and I feel extremely fortunate to have worked with such incredible people and with such a visually rich collection of artworks, some of which I previously could only have dreamed of being able to see in person.