The Texas Oil Industry Oral History Project
As a project for the Spring 2011 course, Understanding and Serving Users, I worked with the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History on The Texas Oil Industry Oral History Project. This oral history project is a series of oral reminiscences of pioneers of all phases of oil fields and oil booms–roughnecks, drillers, promoters, financiers, contractors, lease...
iSchool You
As a founding member of the University of Texas School of Information’s podcast, iSchool You, I worked with a team to build this recording project from the ground up. With no previous experience or sponsorship from the school, our team conceived of the program, structured a workflow, learned to use recording hardware and editing software, designed...
The Arthur J. Higgins Texas Films Collection
This itinerant film collection was made by filmmaker Arthur J. Higgins in the 1930s and 40s. It includes films from Higgins’ visits to towns across Texas where he recorded posed scenes of daily life there that focused primarily on the residents, for whom the film was typically shown at a local theater. I performed descriptive cataloging...
Developing Guidelines for Evaluation and Appraisal of VHS Collections at TAMI
As my final professional experience project for my MSIS, I carried out a case study of VHS materials acquisitioned by TAMI at the El Paso Film Round-up in 2011 for the purpose of researching various methods of collection representation. The goal was to create appraisal standards for VHS, considering the vast number of VHS tapes entering...
The Carole Eastman Collection
The Carole Eastman Papers at the Harry Ransom Center contains scripts, correspondence, handwritten notes, printed material, photographs, and press clippings documenting the career of screenwriter Carole Eastman. Most of the materials relate to two of her films, Five Easy Pieces and Man Trouble. There is also notable correspondence with both Jack Nicholson and Jeanne Moreau. Following...
The George Sanger Diskettes at the UT Videogame Archive
As part of a group project for Dr. Patricia Galloway’s Spring 2012 course, INF 392K, Digital Archiving and Preservation, I contributed to the preservation of the George Sanger Diskettes Collection, a part of the George Sanger Papers in the UT Videogame Archive at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History. We received six diskette boxes and seven loose...
Preservation and Exhibition of The Queen (1968)
As a part of work on the Lewis Allen collection at the Harry Ransom Center, I carried out extensive film preservation work (cleaning, splicing, rehousing) on the valuable outtake collection from early GLBT documentary, The Queen, shot on 16mm sync sound double-system. I collected technical metadata and assessed deterioration of film materials in order to generate records for...
The Thomas F. Freeman Collection
This home movie collection at the Texas Archive of the Moving Image was donated by Dr. Thomas F. Freeman- the legendary debate coach and professor at Texas Southern University, African-American community leader, and minister of Houston’s Mt. Horem Baptist Church. I performed descriptive cataloging and indexing of approximately 140 digitized films in the collection, conducting extensive...
www.MeltonBarker.org
Texas itinerant filmmaker Melton Barker made the same film, The Kidnappers Foil, approximately 200 times in different towns across the United States. I developed a satellite website for TAMI dedicated to Barker, highlighting his films and the extensive research on Barker performed by TAMI Executive Director Caroline Frick and Moving Image Archivist Dwight Swanson. I conceived of a website architecture...
3rd Collection and Additional Thoughts on Categories
For the past few weeks at TAMI, we’ve all been helping with an audit of the online library. We’re reviewing each video in the library to check for consistent metadata, such as keywords and categories, and making sure there are video thumbnails and a player image on the video’s page. While going through my share...
Revised Guidelines Draft
Following my notes from the sampling experiment, I revised my draft to streamline the evaluation process. While still a draft, the revisions are below. I am testing this new set of guidelines on a collection now and will document the results of the process soon. Evaluation Process and Criteria for Appraising Home Movie VHS...
Applying the Criteria in Collection Two
Using my revised Guidelines outlined in the previous post, I completed cataloging, indexing, and segment curation for a second VHS collection. This collection was comprised of 16 VHS and ran at approximately 11 hours total. It took me 4 hours and 1 minute to complete both the descriptive and evaluative processes, a significant improvement over...