Current RML Fellow Robert Anen works on the film collection at Old Westbury Gardens in Old Westbury, NY.
**The Regional Media Legacies Project is currently on hiatus.**
The Regional Media Legacies Blog
Click here to read our posts and learn about the collections we have worked on.
About the Regional Media Legacies Project
The Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAP) program situated within the Department of Cinema Studies in the Kanbar Institute of Film & Television in NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts embarked on the Regional Media Legacies (RML) project with the appointment of Project Manager, Marie Lascu in April 2019. The RML project is provided support from the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation to train MIAP archivists on the management and care of film, video, audio, and digital media held across Long Island and New York City (Queens and Brooklyn, specifically). The RML project was created because regional audiovisual collections have been historically undervalued and often go unpreserved.
The RML project will honor the unique, informative, and often powerful stories that local media can continue to tell. Media made for regional audiences, especially those housed in organizations that lack archival resources or the skills of audiovisual specialists, often constitute what libraries and archives call hidden collections—rare recordings that capture local history and culture in a way that larger and better-resourced media collections often do not. The archival profession and scholarly community now recognize that local television, home movies, the works of independent artists, and region-specific productions tend to document lives and communities that are often invisible to national media and the entertainment industry.
NYU MIAP’s RML launched the core of its program in Fall 2019 with the appointment of a post-graduate fellow based in Long Island and a student internship onsite in Brooklyn. The 2019/2020 academic year focused on researching, identifying, and assessing existing audiovisual collections held in select memory institutions across the region. A second post-graduate fellow was appointed in Fall 2020. The final academic year of 2020/2021 focused on working with the partner sites the RML team connected with to support them in moving toward documentation of their current audiovisual collections and long-term preservation goals.
For the remainder of 2021, the RML Project Manager will finalize relevant documentation of project work and materials to pass on to a new team, while remaining available to partners for consultation, and co-supervising as necessary two fall internships.
New project information will be announced as soon as it becomes available! We look forward to the next phase of the RML project.
Selection of Historical Organizations
The RML project is looking to work with organizations that manage audiovisual collections of their own, or work with smaller organizations or individuals in need of assistance with their own audiovisual collections. This includes, but is not limited to: archives, museums, historical societies, television stations, and media producers. We are also interested in connecting with individuals with media who may not be associated with a specific organization.
RML project activity is subject to the guidelines mandated by New York University. Most project activities are currently being conducted remotely. Current recommendations allow negotiation around onsite visits or work as long as safety protocols are in place to ensure the safety of both project staff and your staff.
As the pandemic continues, we all remain as open and flexible as is reasonable. Even though your organization may not be open to the public or we may not be able to meet and work in person, the RML project is still interested in working with you in some form, if possible.
If you are part of an organization with an audiovisual collection located in Brooklyn, Queens, or Long Island and are interested in contributing to our research please email RMLproject@nyu.edu. Once we hear from you, someone will reach out with more information. We will also ask that you separately fill out the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation's Collections Care Form.
Regional Media Legacies Team
Project Manager, Marie Lascu
Marie Lascu is the Audiovisual Archivist for Crowing Rooster Arts, a non-profit that has spent 20 years documenting the arts and political struggles of Haiti, and Digital Archivist for Ballet Tech, a public school for dance in NYC. She also works as an independent archival consultant with organizations such as Third World Newsreel and the Community Archiving Workshop subcommittee under the Association of Moving Image Archivists. She is a graduate of NYU’s M.A. in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program (’12), and is the 2016 recipient of the Society of American Archivists Spotlight Award.
RML Project Fellow 2019/2020 & 2020/2021, Robert Anen
RML Project Fellow 2020/2021, Claire Fox
Director of the MIAP Program and Principal Investigator, RML, Juana Suárez
Academic Program Manager, MIAP, Jessica Cayer