Presentation

By the Slice!

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Abstract

Speakers present a variety of lightning talks about ideas, workflows, and projects in progress.

Resurrecting the Guerrilla Television Movement, Dan Erdman, Adam Hart, Elise Schierbeek
The 1967 debut of the Sony Portapak camera brought an explosion of independent video production, much of it created by BIPOC, women, the disabled, low-income people, and those in rural areas. But the technology that enabled these works now ironically is a barrier to access; thanks to the advanced decay of the tapes themselves and the obsolescence of the playback equipment, video work from this era is at a severe risk. To make matters worse, lack of access to these materials has reinforced their exclusion from media history and has hampered attempts to advocate for their preservation."Media Burn Archive is addressing this challenge by initiating an ambitious rescue effort, called Resurrecting the 1970s Guerrilla Television Movement, funded by the Council on Library andnformation Resources. This ongoing effort consists of collaboration with archives, media centers, and individual creators to identify, inventory, digitize, and make accessible more than a thousand tapes from 1967–1980. The project will culminate in the creation of the Guerrilla Television Network, a web portal that will stream thousands of works from this era, complete with identifying and contextual information, much of it provided by the original creators. The presentation will focus on the challenges specific to preserving and creating access to this material and how media scholarship will change due to the project.

Oiling the Steel Pan: A Deep-Dish Dive into Strategic Planning at the IUN Archives, Jeremy Pekarek
This meaty presentation is served up in just minutes to discuss the importance and implementation of strategic planning for solo archivists at university archives. Developing an archival strategic plan can be a daunting task that requires foresight, change, and institutional knowledge. As a newly hired out-of-stater with little institutional and regional knowledge, I quickly became acquainted with various resources and gathered information for the future development of the Indiana University Northwest (IUN) Archives. Within the first few months of arrival, a five-year strategic plan was considered for the archives. This plan included four manageable goals that related to both standard archival practices and individualized, institutional needs. To understand and establish priorities, first, it was necessary to collect information. This is where various tools played an important role for the direction delivery. Strategic planning greases the pan for future success. Join this short presentation to learn how the IUN Archives developed a long-term plan using simple but meaningful tools.

Remembering Environmental Disasters, Jeff Hirschy
Environmental disasters have afflicted humans and their civilizations since the beginning of time. These disasters can be storms, fires, floods, blizzards, disease, and so many other things. In the aftermath of these disasters, public history and memory are often constructed to help people process and remember what happened. We need to talk about it when such things happen. Understanding this, and it’s related power, can help the people of today and tomorrow learn important lessons that they can apply to their own stories as the 21st century continues. In the early 21st century, understanding this power, and how it can be used, is an important thing to understand as the world’s environment becomes more unstable because of climate change and other issues. Hurricane, and other storm memorials and archives have been constructed to remember the victims of hurricanes and allow others to honor the fallen and fire memorials remember both the victims of fires and the firefighters that fought them. All of this development is an important, changing, and growing aspect of both public history and environmental history and to understand it more this paper will look at monuments and archives in the United States related to environmental disasters associated with fire and storms in the American South and the Midwest.

How to Cite:

Erdman, D., Hart, A., Schierbeek, E., Pekarek, J. & Hirschy, J., (2023) “By the Slice!”, MAC Annual Meeting Presentations 2023(1).