Toward a More Equitable Field: Broadening the Landscape with Fellowships in Audiovisual Preservation

Abstract

The cost of a master’s degree, the clumping of AV focused master’s programs and jobs on the East and West Coasts, and the limited opportunities for education contribute to structural inequalities making it difficult for a diverse array of new professionals to enter into the field of audiovisual archiving. This article provides an overview of the Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellowship program, which seeks to lower some barriers to entry to the audiovisual archiving field. It concludes with information about additional forthcoming research and programs being led by the Association of Moving Image Archivists and the National Film Preservation Board.

Keywords:

• Equity and inclusion
• fellowship programs
• paid internships
• audiovisual preservation
• audiovisual archivist

Acknowledgments

Laura Rooney, Managing Director of the Association of Moving Image Archivists. The Institute of Museum and Library Services, which provided initial funding for the PBPF program. The National Film Preservation Board and the NFPB Diversity Task Force. Members of the AMIA Continuing Education Advisory Task Force. Members of the AMIA Advocacy Committee of the Board. The original Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellowship hosts, partners, and Fellows (https://pbpf.americanarchive.org/past-partners/)

Notes

1 “AMIA Education Committee,” AMIA Education Committee, Association of Moving Image Archivists, last modified September 4, 2016, https://amiaeducomm.wordpress.com/education/masters-programs/ (accessed April 7, 2020).

2 “Moving Image Archiving and Preservation M.A.,” New York University, last modified September 26, 2019, https://tisch.nyu.edu/cinema-studies/miap (accessed April 7, 2020).

3 “Tisch School of the Arts Graduate 2017-2018,” New York University, https://www.nyu.edu/students/student-information-and-resources/bills-payments-and-refunds/tuition-and-fee-rates/2017-2018/tisch-school-of-the-arts-graduate-2017-2018.html (accessed April 7, 2020).

4 “Areas of Specialization,” UCLA Department of Information Studies, University of California Los Angeles, https://is.gseis.ucla.edu/programs/mlis-degree/mlis-specializations/ (accessed April 7, 2020).

5 “Tuition and Student Fees,” UCLA Graduate Education, University of California Los Angeles, https://grad.ucla.edu/funding/tuition/ (accessed April 7, 2020).

6 “Masters in Film & Media Preservation,” Eastman Museum, https://www.eastman.org/masters-film-media-preservation (accessed April 7, 2020).

7 Janet Ceja and Adam Schutzman, “Syllabus Analysis of AV Archiving Curriculum” (paper presented at the Association of Moving Image Archivists conference, New Orleans, LA, December 1, 2017). https://scalar.usc.edu/works/about/media/Ceja%20and%20Schutzman_AMIA%202017_Syllabus%20Analysis%20of%20Audiovisual%20Archiving%20Curriculum.pdf.

8 Teague Schneiter and Jacqueline Stewart, “Sustaining the Profession” (paper presented at the Association of Moving Image Archivists conference, Baltimore, MD, November 15, 2019).

9 Andy Uhrich, “AMIA Continuing Education Advocacy Task Force Report” (Report, AMIA Continuing Education Advisory Task Force, Baltimore, MD, 2019).

10 “About the AAPB,” American Archive of Public Broadcasting, The Library of Congress and WGBH Educational Foundation, https://americanarchive.org/about-the-american-archive (accessed January 27, 2020).

11 “Past Partners and Fellows,” AAPB Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellowship, The Library of Congress and WGBH Educational Foundation, https://pbpf.americanarchive.org/past-partners/ (accessed January 27, 2020).

12 “About the Fellowship,” AAPB Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellowship, The Library of Congress and WGBH Educational Foundation, https://pbpf.americanarchive.org/about-the-fellowships/ (accessed January 27, 2020).

13 Ceja and Schutzman, “Syllabus Analysis of AV Archiving Curriculum.”

14 Andy Uhrich, “AMIA Continuing Education Advocacy Task Force Report.”

15 Liz Bishoff, “Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellowship Program Assessment” (Report, The Bishoff Group LLC, Denver, CO, October 2, 2018).

16 Sarah Buchanan, Virginia Angles, Rebecca Benson, Evelyn Cox, Riley Griffin, Laura Haygood, Eric Saxon, Dena Schulze, Steve Wilcer, and Tanya Yule, “Opening Up Audiovisual Archives Education: The Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellowship” (poster presented at the Society of American Archivists conference, Washington, DC, August 2018.) https://www2.archivists.org/sites/all/files/aapb_saa_poster.compressed.pdf.

17 Rebecca Fraimow, Sarah Buchanan, Tanya Yule, Laura Haygood, Steve Wilcer, and Virginia Angles, “Evolving an Audiovisual Preservation Infrastructure: The Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellowship” (panel presentation at the National Digital Stewardship Alliance annual meeting, Las Vegas, NV, October 2018).

18 Bishoff.

19 James Elmborg, e-mail to Rebecca Fraimow, January 22, 2020.

20 James Elmborg, e-mail to Rebecca Fraimow and Casey Davis Kaufman, June 13, 2018.

21 Bishoff.

22 Teague Schneiter and Jacqueline Stewart, “Sustaining the Profession.”

23 Rebecca Fraimow, e-mail to James Elmborg, September 6, 2018.

24 Ibid.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Casey Davis Kaufman

Casey Davis Kaufman (she/her) is the Associate Director of the WGBH Media Library and Archives and Project Manager for the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. Between 2017-2018, Casey served as the Project Director for the IMLS-funded Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellowship. From 2017 to 2019, she served on the Board of Directors for the Association of Moving Image Archivists and with Teague Schneiter she helped establish the AMIA conference “Roundtable” format, the Advocacy Committee of the Board, the Continuing Education Advisory Task Force, and the Diversity and Inclusion Fellowship Program Task Force. She continues to serve on these committees and task forces. She has served as a mentor for the National Digital Stewardship Residency Boston program and co-led with Rebecca Fraimow the AAPB National Digital Stewardship Residency program. She is also the project manager for “Rising from the Ashes: The Chimney Tops II Wildfires Oral History Project” at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Libraries.

James Elmborg

James Elmborg is Professor and Director of the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alabama. He has published widely on libraries as learning spaces and how critical theory can help libraries conceptualize learning and space. He has a long history of working with media technologies in the context of libraries. He was a librarian at Wofford College and Furman University working on pedagogy and learning in the digital liberal arts from 1998-2000 before moving to the University of Iowa. At Iowa, he established the Writing University Archive in 2003. The archive houses several hundred audio and video recordings of writers talking about their craft. He was an early advocate of the digital humanities, and he brought Library and Information Science into DH through the creation of a graduate certificate in the digital humanities, and he was subsequently co-PI on Digital Bridges for Humanistic Inquiry, a collaborative Mellon grant between the University of Iowa and Grinnell College. He currently is developing a new track in audio-visual archiving at University of Alabama.

Rebecca Fraimow

Rebecca Fraimow (she/her) is the Digital Archives Manager at the WGBH Media Library and Archives, where she oversees the long-term preservation of digital production materials as well as project managing collaborative initiatives for archival training and education, such as the IMLS-funded Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellowship. She also co-led the AAPB National Digital Stewardship Residency program, after which she collaborated on the development of the NDSR Handbook.

Teague Schneiter

Teague Schneiter is the Sr. Manager and founder of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Oral History Projects department in Los Angeles. She came to the Academy in 2012 with over 10 years of moving image research, curatorial, and audiovisual collection management experience, working with oral history and other cultural heritage materials in Australia, the Netherlands, and the United States and Canada (with human rights video advocacy organization WITNESS and indigenous media organization Isuma.TV). Since November 2016, Teague has proudly served as a Board member as and Vice President of the Association of Moving Image Archivists. Teague helped establish the AMIA’s conference’s “Roundtable” format, as well co-founded the Advocacy Committee of the Board, the Continuing Education Advisory Task Force, and the Diversity and Inclusion Fellowship Program and Task Force. From 2018-2019 she was commissioned as the principal project manager and writer for the National Film Preservation Board’s Diversity Task Force report “Cultural Equity and Inclusion in the Moving Image Archival Field.”

Moriah Ulinskas

Moriah Ulinskas is an audiovisual archivist, PhD candidate in Public History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a founding member of the Community Archiving Workshop- a collective of film and video archivists who work to help communities maintain intellectual control over their legacy recordings. From 2011 to 2017 she served as Diversity Chair for the Association of Moving Image Archivists and was the Preservation Program Director at the Bay Area Video Coalition from 2011 to 2014. In her role at BAVC, she oversaw the development of the first release of QCTOOLS, open source software for audiovisual preservationists, and established the NEA funded Preservation Access Program. She is a contributor to the recently published Citizen Internees: A Second Look at Race and Citizenship in Japanese American Internment Camps has published articles in KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies and Places Journal.