We will be attending the conference Saving Private Reels, Appropriation and Re-contextualisation of the Amateur Moving Image, at University College Cork with keynotes by Roger Odin and Patricia Zimmermann. The gathering is funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences as part of the research project, Capturing the Nation: Irish Home Movies, 1930-1970. On Friday, September 17, Karan Sheldon and Katrina Dixon will present "Describing Amateur Films of Work Life. Collection- and Item-Level Discoveries, 50 Collections/1,200 Reels."
We look forward to the opportunity to benefit from the most current thoughts of scholars working in the arena where we provide research materials. We hope to communicate the urgency of maintaining and exposing the provenance of moving image materials. Twentieth-century moving images are both lost, and there is less possibility of understanding them when found, when they lack context. Emerging scholarship will advance, we believe, when libraries and archives are able to provide a three-dimensional sense of moving image creators' work through skillful finding aids and attached reel information. And these research tools will become even more powerful when they point to associated material and the results of original scholarship.
Katrina Dixon, media cataloger, will discuss her discoveries on joining Northeast Historic Film, inviting dialog with panel attendees. In February 2010 Dixon and her team set out to create new records for 50 film collections. To our knowledge this is the first project creating original DACS finding aids for audiovisual collections (Encoded Archival Description allowing XML export) to be integrated with PBCore item-level records of the film reels.
Customized open source database software CollectiveAccess is used to create the collection-level finding aids. Collaboration on a shared Web-enabled system allows for review of works in progress. For the item-level records, although we do not yet have the CollectiveAccess tools, we are cataloging approximately 40 items per week. Go here to see the PBCore records as they are being written. Our purpose is to raise public and scholarly awareness of moving images as important primary source materials for enjoyment and use. Our true goal is to support and encourage a much closer relationship between users and the collections. Interaction with the moving images in their larger context at the archives has enormous benefits.
