Wednesday, June 22, 2005

Okay...so here my is brief attempt to blog regarding Anna's request that we all speak up about our internships/practica/jobs/what have you.

As a first year I wasn't in the practicum loop really but economics still applied and I had to find a student job. After a quarter of rejection (I can only assume that my resume was too random or something...dunno) and Amy's constant encouragement (thanks Amy!), I finally landed a job with the UCLA Libraries Oral History Project. I don't deal with moving images at all and actually don't even deal with the audio tapes of interviews. It has been a great experience though and, at least tangentally related to moving images. I correct/index/format and create tables of contents for oral history transcripts as an editorial assistant. There are numerous histories dealing with the motion picture industry. So far I've only worked on a few moving image related histories--among them the transcripts for video artists Chick Strand and Susan Mogul, as well as for a journalist who wrote articles on the making of "Salt of the Earth" and the Hollywood Blacklist.

I also just finished up a brief stint at the UCLA Film and Television Archive. I helped to scan the half-million or so notecards that serve as the catalogue to the Hearst Metrotone Newsreel Collection which was donated to the UCLA Archive in the 1980s (I think). Basically I would just sit in this little window-less, ventalition-less room with another scanner and the Archive's server, prep the cards (examine for tears, folds, staples, etc.), load piles of them into scanners, and then review the completed scans to make sure they looked good. The room would average about 81 degrees which would make the urgency of preservation all the more real (how can anything, inanimate or not, survive for long in such conditions?). My last day I scanned 15,050 cards and left the job with an odd feeling of accomplishment. I have always excelled at the menial and mundane.

So that's about it...this summer I'll eventually spend over a month working in Special Collections at the University of Washington (my birth place and college/first grad school) Libraries. I just visited them yesterday and am very excited. They have all sorts of great regional history/scientific/educational films--many of which have yet to be inventoried. In addition I'll be helping out with the Seattle edition of Home Movie Day at MOHAI. It is, I must say, a bit odd to be at UW once again (if I show up there next year as well I bet ya they'll start pursuing some sort of restraining order) but I've come to accept that I'm bound to end up haunting the place for life and figure I might as well start sooner rather than later.

I'm also working with some local historical societies in the south Puget Sound area, where I grew up, to evaluate their film--and will hopefully be able to put together a digital access copy as part of my portfolio.

So that's it..for now ;)

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