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UCLA IS Media Preservation Lab Partners With LA Communities to Digitally Preserve Local Media Collections
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by Joanie Harmon
The UCLA Department of Information Studies runs a state-of-the-art lab, where students gain hands-on training and participate in projects to preserve community histories.
The department has expanded the preparation of students in its Master of Library and Information Science program for practical work in media archiving and preservation with its IS Media Preservation Lab, which formally opened in Winter 2022. Part of the department’s larger IS Library facilities, the lab is housed in the SEIS Building in North Campus. It was created through a $300,000 gift from a local foundation to support the Center for Preservation of Audiovisual Heritage (CPAH), which now operates out of the lab.
In 2022, the lab successfully supported an initial round of CPAH projects aimed at digitally preserving media materials in community-held collections.
“We’re focused on preserving community-held media collections that document the cultural and historical diversity of the SoCal region,” says Shawn VanCour, associate professor of information studies, who supervised the lab’s construction and directed the first round of preservation projects using the new space.
Students in the department’s MLIS program preserved materials in collections of several community-based archives and other local arts and cultural organizations, gaining hands-on skills using the lab’s equipment and helping local organizations to make content originally housed on vulnerable, obsolete audiovisual formats accessible to their intended publics.
“We’re pursuing a curriculum-based model for media preservation [for] students who are training in the Media Archival Studies area of our MLIS program,” VanCour explained. “Once they hit an appropriate point in their training, they are cleared to work with community-held collections in the context of their courses [and] for faculty-supervised independent studies and practicum exercises. Our department also houses chapters of two of the country’s main professional societies for AV archivists, the Association of Moving Image Archivists and the Association for Recorded Sound Collections. These groups have been using the lab to train their own members and pursue a number of additional community-oriented preservation projects throughout this past year.”
Formerly a smaller suite in the main room of the IS Library, the Media Preservation Lab moved to a larger, adjacent room, renovated through a gift from the late Professor Robert M. Hayes, who from 1974 to 1989 served as dean of the then UCLA Graduate School of Library and Information Science. This expanded space has provided room for the lab’s new equipment purchases, as well as several recent donations, including a vintage open-reel videotape machine received from Corday Productions, that was used in the production of NBC’s long-running soap opera, “Days of Our Lives.” The new equipment includes several high-end items, such as a Prism audio converter, a Timestep preamp for deriving material from vinyl records and other grooved media, and a custom-built Kinetta archival film scanner that enables work with a variety of delicate and damaged film formats.
“Preservation spaces like this include a mix of hard-to-find obsolete playback technologies and state-of-the-art digital technologies used to transfer and restore media content to something approximating its original state,” says Professor VanCour. “There are very few places that have this kind of equipment. Students walk out of our program saying,
‘I was trained on a Prism,’ or ‘I know how to use a Kinetta.’ Those are not skills that most people have straight out of grad school, and it gives our MLIS students a competitive edge.”
A number of IS classes have used the new lab space since its opening in February. Students in a digital preservation course taught by Professor Anne Gilliland used some of the specialized digital forensics software on the lab’s computers, and students in classes taught by VanCour and Professor Michelle Caswell participated in CPAH pilot projects, preserving materials from community-held collections.
Caswell, a co-founder of the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA), recruited the organization to participate in her spring course on community-based archives. Her students processed a SAADA collection that included materials from ArtWallah, a South Asian American arts festival in the early 2000s in Los Angeles, that included poetry, musical performances, painting, and sculpture.
Thuy Vo Dang, who joined the faculty of the UCLA Department of Information Studies in the fall, taught an oral history methods course in the 2023 Winter quarter. Her students were able to use the Lab for their coursework, as well as gain skills they need to enter the archival field.
“My students greatly benefited from the loan of portable field recorders for their interview recordings, and some also made use of the video and audio editing equipment and support from the Media Preservation Lab,” says Professor Vo Dang, a scholar of oral history and community archives.
“The grad students who staff the Lab introduced everyone to the myriad resources available there to support our learning journey. It’s an important hub for cultivating technical expertise around the use and preservation of various audio-visual media.”
VanCour’s course in audio archiving was designed as a primary pilot course, based on training students in the new lab space with the goal of digitizing materials in community-held collections for final projects.
“The first part of the class was exposing students to the different formats that they would be working with over the course of the quarter, so they got practice handling and assessing those media, then they did some practice transfer exercises, using our lab equipment so they would know how to operate all of the machines [and] properly digitize these materials,” says Professor VanCour. “Once they finished that training and demonstrated their competence in these areas, they received clearance to work with the community-provided collections.”
The class partnered with three local organizations that selected priority content from their collections for students to digitize. The June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives provided oral histories and musical performances from the 1960s through the 1980s on cassette tapes and reel-to-reel tapes, as well as a rare vinyl record from their collections. The Skid Row History Museum & Archive provided recordings from the early 2000s of activist theater performances by the LA Poverty Department on Digital Audio Tape, and LAist Radio selected several episodes of its local news and public affairs program, “Air Talk with Larry Mantle,” with original airdates from 2002–2005, housed on DATs, MiniDiscs, and CDs. Over 40 hours of content were successfully preserved by students, which will be used by the participating organizations in current projects and made available to users of their collections now that they are in an accessible, digital form.
In addition to the pilot projects in VanCour’s and Caswell’s classes, the Lab also assisted producers of the independently produced “This Way Out,” a self-described “international LGBTQ radio magazine” distributed to community radio stations across the U.S. and abroad. More than a hundred episodes were archived on Jaz disks, a shortlived format that was a descendant of Iomega’s Zip drive and cannot be read by modern computers. Students accessed the contents of a dozen provided disks using the Lab’s specialized forensics software, and the producers are now working with federal government institutions on plans to make this content accessible through a national collecting repository.
“Some of these media don’t hold up well over time,” says VanCour, noting that many of the digital formats can deteriorate even faster than their analog predecessors. “It’s a good thing we got to these now, while they were still playable.”
There are very few collections these days that do not have media in them, but there are very few iSchools that are actually teaching students how to work with these formats in any in-depth manner. It’s a real point of distinction for our program that we are able to offer this, and in a way that directly benefits our community as well.
Chloe Reyes, a MLIS student who works as the department’s lab assistant and serves as technical coordinator for CPAH projects, says that with the IS Media Preservation Lab, “… the possibilities are so endless.” Reyes, who earned a prior degree in film production at CalArts, has been teaching film classes at the Echo Park Film Center for 10 years and also worked as a projectionist, coming to the MLIS program with a depth of prior professional skills already in hand. She assisted VanCour with the initial construction of the lab and, as he puts it, “put a lot of this stuff together with her own two hands.”
“I really, really have enjoyed my time in the MLIS program,” says Reyes, who worked as a project assistant when the lab was being built. “The Community Archive Lab that Michelle Caswell started got me interested in the program, and this media lab was opening up just in time. Once the installation [work] was done, I stayed on, and I’ve been building documentation and organizing technical workshops for students to learn the different stations, as well as coordinating technology needs for project work with community archives.”
Reyes has also been assisting IS lecturer Janet Ceja, Ph.D., with preparing a fall course in film preservation that is making active use of lab facilities. As the next installment in CPAH’s projects, this course was designed by Ceja following the same curriculum-based model pursued for the department’s spring classes, with students digitizing materials for final projects from community-held collections. For this course, Ceja has partnered with Deserted Films in Palm Springs, which has a number of Southern California-themed home movies that students will transfer on the Kinetta. These films will be publicly screened by the organization once the transfers are completed.
Last fall, Ceja taught a fall course in film preservation, partnering with Deserted Films in Palm Springs, a regional archive of films mainly produced in Palms Springs and other surrounding desert regions. Her students gained professional archiving skills including transferring film using the Kinetta, and inventorying, assessing, and digitizing a collection from the film archive. Their efforts can now be viewed on the organization’s website. (desertedfilms.org)
“Knowing that I had access to the Media Preservation Lab, I designed a course using Project Based Learning, a learner-centered approach that encourages engagement in real-world activities through ‘learning-by-doing,’” says Ceja, who connected with Deserted Films co-founders Melissa Dollman—a UCLA IS alumna—and Devin Oregon through the Lab. “In the Lab, learners gained and practiced the skills necessary to process the Deserted Films collection as they would in a professional setting, because we were using a state-of-the art facility and we were working with a community organization’s treasured film collection. Additionally, the amazing Lab staff and student workers helped me tremendously by facilitating some workshops on film handling and digitization.
“By engaging in a real-world, hands on project, we were able to clearly connect with the theoretical questions from class readings and discussions. In this sense, we achieved a most satisfying praxis.”
Dino Everett, a lecturer in the UCLA Department of Information Studies and the archivist of the HMH Foundation Moving Image Archive at USC (formerly the Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive), teaches a course in moving image technology.
“I have often said that properly teaching students to enter the archiving field, whether this be traditional paper-based materials or audio-visual materials, really sits somewhat uncomfortably in between traditional academic studies and that of a trade school,” he says. “Programs shouldn’t rely solely on students gaining ‘skills’ from internships. Instead, they should provide methods for them to acquire some of these skills as part of the overall curriculum.”
“For instance, in the past it was quite challenging to get students to think critically about the concepts and challenges of digitizing and restoring old media when they had no concept of the tasks involved to perform such actions. From an academic perspective, this would be like trying to get them to understand the complexities of a certain formalized theory from one of the popular humanities without being able to tell them the framework of the theory first.”
In Everett’s course at UCLA, students have the opportunity to work directly with one of the collections of the HMH Foundation Moving Image Archive, and have access to internships at the archive.
“The existence of the Media Preservation Lab not only allows students the ability to acquire and develop the various necessary skills students will need to enter the field of audiovisual archiving [and] allows the faculty to expand upon the ideas and concepts that they can help students theorize and think critically about.”
Professor VanCour says that UCLA has the only ALA-accredited MLIS program with a specialization dedicated to media archival studies and is one of the only universities in the country with a fully equipped media preservation lab for instructional use.
“There are very few collections these days that do not have media in them, but there are very few iSchools that are actually teaching students how to work with these formats in any in-depth manner,” he says. “It’s a real point of distinction for our program that we are able to offer this, and in a way that directly benefits our community as well.”
