Stan Midgley transformed what was once a hobby into a successful full-time career as a travelogue lecturer, making over four thousand live appearances and showing his travelogue films on local television programs. During his lifetime, Midgley traveled to all U.S. states, visiting almost every national park, landmark, and major metropolis in North America. His love of regionalism mixed with his folksy, down-home humor earned him the moniker “Mark Twain with a camera.”

Vastly overlooked and understudied in modern times, the genre of travel lecture films flourished in the early 20th century and was a very important aspect of early cinematic documentation. Midgley’s collection at UCLA consists of under-identified materials requiring in-depth metadata documentation and digitization to facilitate public access and discourse. The collection includes over 2,000 reels of 16mm film that need to be organized and spliced into larger reels for curated digitization. Midgley’s collection of photographs, audio reels/tapes, promotional materials, and communications also need to be curated for academic discovery and preservation.

Due to the collection’s size, the intern will focus on materials from Midgley’s public presentations and outtake reels featuring Southern California, including Los Angeles, the Central Coast, and national parks in California.

The intern will curate and assemble reels of outtakes from the Midgley collection, focusing on footage from California. As the Archive owns the copyright to the collection, the reels selected will eventually be digitized and made available for viewing online. In addition to the outtakes, the intern will also inspect audio tapes to create recommendations for digitization and evaluate paper and ephemera to add additional metadata and remove redundant copies of items.

The intern will create a public-facing study guide and 700–800-word blog to contextualize the Stan Midgley Travel Lecture Collection drawing on the unique knowledge they obtained through the internship. The guide and blog will be available on the Archive’s website and serve as crucial tools for a wide range of users to engage with this collection and other related archival materials within the UCLA Library. In addition, the intern will recommend ten titles from the collection that will be added to the Archive’s YouTube Channel, providing free access and discovery to students, researchers, and the general public.

Required Skills and Knowledge:

Qualified candidates should demonstrate an interest in moving image archival collections, conservation and preservation, and research related to film and television history, in particular, the genre of travelogue and amateur filmmaking, home movies, and documentaries with a focus on nature and scenic landmarks in California during the 1940s-1970s.

Please submit a resume, cover letter, and writing sample to apply. The writing sample should be a research paper demonstrating a critical analysis of any topic relating to film, television, and/or media production focusing on history, production, theory, and/or visual style; the paper may include archival research, but this is not a requirement.

The position is open to UC and NON-UC undergrads, and students who graduated in the Spring of ’25 are also eligible.

Applicants must attend college in or be permanent residents of LA County.

Application Deadline: April 20, 2025

To apply, please visit: https://www.library.ucla.edu/about/student-opportunities

If you are not a UCLA student, please enter all 0’s in the UCLA Student ID Number field in the application.

Job Code: FTVA14

This position is a Getty Morrow Undergraduate Internship. Please see the Getty’s website, [https://www.getty.edu/projects/getty-marrow-undergraduate-internships/|https://www.getty.edu/projects/getty-marrow-undergraduate-internships/], for more information on this internship and eligibility requirements.