Lois Weber's Shoes (1916)
The hand of poverty.
Courtesy: Milestone Films (link: https://www.milestonefilms.com)
Committees
The Regional Audio-Visual Archives (RAVA) Committee addresses the needs and concerns of archivists who find themselves responsible for preserving and providing access to audiovisual materials that document the history of geographical areas and local cultures. This committee seeks to enhance communication and collaboration between regional archivists and explore initiatives that bring greater attention to the value and challenges of regional audiovisual materials.
The purpose of the RAVA Incubator Subcommittee is to nurture and facilitate the development and sustainability of audiovisual archival non-profit organizations whose mission is exclusively dedicated to regional moving image content. The subcommittee will offer new, existing, and emerging organizations various resources, including: shared experience, mentoring, networking opportunities, and professional development.
This Google Map was created by the RAVA Committee to assist researchers in finding organizations that hold unique archival movies and recorded sounds that document the history and culture of specific regions.
The information can also be found as a Google Spreadsheet here. Please contact siobhan@marmia.org to add or modify an organization’s information.
Regional Representatives are RAVA committee members who have generously volunteered to help answer your questions about working with audiovisual archives in specific regions of the United States. Representatives are not available for in-depth reference consultations, but may provide general guidance on locating regional audiovisual collections and/or donating materials to an appropriate regional archive. If the region you are interested in is not listed below, please consult the Deep Focus Database or contact the RAVA Committee Chair for additional assistance.
Siobhan C. Hagan (siobhan@marmia.org)
Siobhan Hagan is the founder, President, and CEO of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Moving Image Archive and has worked in a variety of collecting organizations throughout her career, including the UCLA Library, the National Aquarium, and DC Public Library. Her particular passion lies in the preservation and access of regional moving images in the U.S. Mid-Atlantic region, with particular areas of interest in: regional audiovisual archives, local television, home movies, and community and personal archiving.
Matthew Wilcox (wilcox36@msu.edu)
Matthew Wilcox is the Audiovisual Archivist at Michigan State University (MSU). He is a member of the Media Preservation Unit, part of the Conservation & Preservation Unit at MSU Libraries, with a secondary assignment at the MSU Archives & Historical Collections. Matthew maintains the playback and scanning equipment in the MSU Libraries’ Media Preservation Lab, where he is responsible for the in-house preservation and digitization of many formats of audio recordings, video tape, and motion picture film. Matthew’s projects include the curation of the WKAR-TV and WMSB-TV kinescopes, and time-based media related to Spartan athletics. He holds an MLIS with a concentration on Archives and Digital Content Management from Wayne State University.
Becca Bender (she/her/hers) (bbender@rihs.org)
Becca Bender is the Archivist & Curator of Moving Image and Recorded Sound at the Rhode Island Historical Society. She has extensive knowledge of local news collections from the perspective of both an archivist and a researcher as she was a documentary archival producer for many years prior to joining the RIHS.
Hannah Palin (filmarc@uw.ed)
Hannah Palin is the Moving Image Curator at the University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections where she helped establish the moving image preservation program. Hannah is the caretaker of the KIRO-TV and KSTW-TV news libraries, the Independent Media Center WTO Protest collection, as well as, noted independent Northwest filmmakers Jean Walkinshaw, Doris Chase, Ruth and Louis Kirk, and George and Helen Smith. She is a co-founder of Moving Image Preservation of Puget Sound.
Brian E. Davis (he, him, his) (brian.davis@oregonstate.edu)
Brian E. Davis is the Head of the Digital Production Unit at Oregon State University Libraries’ Special Collections & Archives Research Center where he manages the library’s digitization and digital preservation activities. Prior to OSU, Brian worked as an audiovisual archivist and a digitization technician at Arizona State University Library’s Department of Archives & Special Collections and as a digital production developer at Duke University Libraries’ Digital Production Center. He holds an MS in Graphic Information Technology from Arizona State University.
Alisha Graefe , M.A. (alishagraefe@gmail.com)
I am an MLIS student at San Jose State University and aspiring moving image archivist. I currently live in Boise, Idaho and work at the Idaho State Archives as an Archivist Assistant and Moving Images volunteer. I am also a volunteer at the Boise City Department of Arts and History. In my spare time, I work for Treefort Music Fest as a Podcast Project Manager and Archivist.”
Jamie Marie Wagner (jamie.wagner@colorado.edu)
Jamie Marie Wagner is the Moving Image Archivist at the University of Colorado Boulder Archives, where she oversees film and video items in the archives’ diverse collections. Since 2019, she has been active in developing collections related to American experimental media and early cinema in Colorado. She has both an MA in Film and an MLIS from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Louisa Trott (ltrott1@utk.edu)
Louisa Trott is the digital projects librarian at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She has worked in various roles at film archives and libraries in the UK and US–mostly with amateur film collections–and is the co-founder of the Tennessee Archive for Moving Image and Sound in Knoxville.
Dave Rodriguez (he, him, his) (dwrodriguez@fsu.edu)
Dave Rodriguez is the Digital Services Librarian in the Technology & Digital Scholarship Division at Florida State University. He has worked in film & audiovisual preservation across museums, academic libraries, and in the private and non-profit sectors. His current role focuses on digital repository management and technical infrastructure.
Alan Munshower (alanm@olemiss.edu)
Alan Munshower is a Special Collections Librarian and Assistant Professor at the University of Mississippi, with a curation area of audio-visual archives. He received his BA from Goucher College, and MLS from the University of Maryland. He also serves as the chair of the Copyright Committee for the Association of Moving Image Archivists.
Southwest (Arizona, Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas)
Emily Vinson (evinson@uh.edu)
Emily Vinson is Audiovisual Archivist and curator of the KUHT and KUHF Collections at the University of Houston Libraries Special Collections. Prior to UH, Emily worked as an archivist at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy; a project archivist preserving unique audio holdings at New York Public Radio; and a fellow in Preservation Administration at New York Public Library. She holds an MS in Information Studies with a Certificate of Advanced Studies in Preservation Administration from the University of Texas, Austin.
Austin Miller (amiller@texasarchive.org)
Austin Miller is the Digital Preservation Specialist at the Texas Archive of the Moving Image (TAMI).
Natasha Margulis (she, her, hers) (nmargulis@astate.edu)
Natasha Margulis is the Political Collections and Digital Archivist for Arkansas State University. She has been working on a local TV news film collection that spans the years from 1973 to 1980 and has resulted in the digitization of over 6000 individual news stories. She has a PhD in history from the University of Cincinnati, an MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh with a specialization in archives, and a DAS from the Society of American Archivists.
Brenda Flora (brenda.flora@gmail.com)
Brenda Flora is the Curator of Moving Images and Recorded Sound at the Amistad Research Center in New Orleans, Louisiana. She became the Center’s first audiovisual archivist in 2010, and has been responsible for creating and implementing AV policy and overseeing numerous grant-funded projects in that time. She holds a Master’s degree in Film Archiving from the University of East Anglia. Prior to joining the team at ARC, she worked at the University of New Orleans Earl K. Long Library, the Tulane University Libraries Recovery Project, and the British University Film and Video Council’s Newsfilm Online project at ITN.
Lauren Sorensen (lauren.sorensen@gmail.com)
Lauren Sorensen is a consultant based in Los Angeles, California specializing in moving image preservation and conservation, digital preservation and access. Over the past fifteen years, Sorensen has been employed by institutions such as Bay Area Video Coalition, Library of Congress, Canyon Cinema and as a consultant has assisted institutions such as the City of Los Angeles’ Department of Cultural Affairs, Glenstone Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others with all manner of digital preservation and access activities. She has previously served on the Board of Directors for the Association of Moving Image Archivists, and is currently on the editorial board for The Moving Image journal. She holds a Master of Arts from New York University in Moving Image Archiving & Preservation (2007), and a Bachelor of Arts in Film & Digital Media from University of California, Santa Cruz (2003).
Janel Quirante (quirante@hawaii.edu)
Janel Quirante is the Head Archivist of ‘Ulu‘ulu Moving Image Archive at the University of Hawai‘i – West Oahu, where she cares for collections related to the history and culture of Native Hawaiians and the people of Hawai‘i. Janel previously worked at the Bay Area Video Coalition, and at the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University. She holds an MLISc from the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, and a BA in Anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley.
Siobhan Hagan, Committee Chair (siobhan@marmia.org)
Siobhan Hagan is currently the Project Manager of the Memory Lab Network at the DC Public Library. She is also the founder, President, and CEO of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Moving Image Archive. Siobhan has worked in a variety of collecting organizations throughout her career, including the UCLA Library, the National Aquarium, and the Smithsonian Institute. Her particular passion lies in the preservation and access of regional moving images in the U.S. Mid-Atlantic region, with particular areas of interest in: regional audiovisual archives, local television, home movies, and community and personal archiving.
Speakers: Becca Bender, Siobhan Hagan, Hannah Palin
RAVA Committee members spoke at the Community Archiving Workshop about how RAVA collections can be remixed and reused by different communities.