AV Archaeology: Excavating Film in University Special Collections

Archival instruction sessions at University of Arizona Special Collections (UASC) customarily have been conducted as single sessions that introduce students to UASC, describe the archive and the archival profession, and provide a brief discussion of the use of discovery tools— something akin to a show- and-tell that highlights the archive’s “greatest hits,” with impact on and measures of student learning left open-ended. Media resources rarely play a part in these sessions. Thus, when film history professor Jennifer L. Jenkins requested a semester-long partnership for a graduate-level media archaeology course, we moved beyond the traditional one-shot instructional approach toward a pedagogical framework that utilized a broader range of UASC resources and brought in a local audiovisual (AV) format expert. We fully “embedded” multimedia archivist Trent S. Purdy in the course, making him a critical partner in content delivery and methodology of the semester’s investigations of media archaeology, with archival media as primary sources. With significant hands-on and applied components, the course tested students’ text-based expectations of graduate work, while the embedded archivist stretched the traditional boundaries of archival instruction. Everyone was working without a net, so to speak, and the results were surprising and invigorating to all involved.

The University of Arizona (UA) offers courses in film history and theory and national cinemas in a number of departments. Courses dedicated to applied principles of moving image archiving and the resources to support such a curriculum are not available at this time. This course was offered on an experimental basis to see how much we could do with what we have. The time-based media holdings at UASC¹ include two-inch videotape, three-fourths-inchU-matic tape,VHS,one-half-inchvideo tape, and 8mm and 16mm film. Of the total seventeen hundred collections stewarded by UASC, seventy-six collections contain film or video. These include personal films by archaeologist and inventor of tree ring dating Andrew Ellicott Douglass, the complete oeuvre of postwar travel filmmaker Ken Wolfgang, home movies from international journalist and playwright Sophie Treadwell, the remains of the university’s original 16mm “teaching collection,”² and a number of 16mm films produced by the Radio-TV Bureau of the UA. Supporting these audiovisual records is the Movie Poster and Associated Materials Collection (MS 528), which holds movie posters, press books, and scripts from films that were shot or set in the southern Arizona region. In 2016, UASC hired Trent S. Purdy as a multimedia archivist. This was a new position with responsibilities centered on curating and stewarding multimedia materials. Creation and sustained funding of this position demonstrate the UA Libraries’ commitment to preserving and providing access to its rich multimedia primary source materials.

A month before the semester began, Trent and Jennifer met to discuss objectives and learning outcomes for the course. The academic focus of the course would be the university’s recently assessed and culled 16mm collection,³ along with film resources held in disparate collections within UASC. Students would select a film in consultation with the professor and would spend the semester working on the object and its intellectual content. Jennifer planned a mixture of academic and applied skills, alternating film history and theory with hands-on days during which students would learn the basics of film inspection, how to thread a projector, and archival best practices for moving image artifacts/resources. She invited a local audiovisual format expert, Bob Nichol of Ping Pong Media, to provide in-depth historical accounts of various time-based media formats and to teach handling and on- site playback of formats. (Ping Pong Media is a state- approved vendor for UASC’s archival transfers and an active AMIA member.) Bob’s involvement with the class created a unique opportunity for Trent, and, by extension, UASC at large, to partner with members of the local community to forge new learning opportunities for students and foster goodwill with noncampus constituents. Moreover, as the UA is the state’s land-grant institution and maintains a commitment to forging “town–gown” relationships, such outreach and...