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Introduction

While archival audiovisual material is frequently utilized to further media literacy education, archives themselves are often absent from the greater discourse. Archivists, especially audiovisual archivists, are tasked with preserving; digitizing; describing; and making accessible these archival motion picture films, videos, and sound recordings and thus represent important stakeholders in media literacy education. While audiovisual archivists often house material considered to be aesthetic wonders, archivists also recognize that not all audiovisual media are created equally. Archivists must reckon with collection items that contain offensive language, images, or broadly contain harmful messaging. Understanding these materials through an archival lens not only necessitates placing them within historical context, but also recognizing the state in which these materials have persisted to exist. Why is audiovisual media preserved, what methods are used, and what factors determine these reasons? Audiovisual archivists could provide lengthy answers to these questions if given the opportunity, and yet they are rarely posed as a matter of media literacy

When I was chosen to be the 2024 Selznick Fellow at the Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC), I knew that I would have the opportunity to hone the skills I had learned as a part of the Selznick School of Film Preservation, as well as be introduced to new ones. So far, I have not been disappointed! One of the skills the RAC has allowed me to practice and refine is film inspection.

You may notice that this blog site looks a little different than it used to! We’ve been working to implement a component-based Style Guide and Style Library to unify the visual language of our websites and applications in a way that is maintainable, will improve future design processes, and is more accessible for users. As part of this effort, we’re excited to announce the launch of two newly redesigned sites: the Bits & Bytes blog where you are reading this post, and our Documentation Site where we share RAC policies and procedures. We’d like to share some behind-the-scenes reflection from the perspectives of project team members Hannah Sistrunk, Patrick Galligan, Darren Young, and Katie Martin on how we used this project as an opportunity to build web development and collaborative coding skills.

My name is Ima Oduok (pronunciation) and it’s a pleasure to introduce myself as the new Assistant Digital Preservation Analyst on the Digital Strategies team! In this role, I will collaborate across RAC departments to contribute to the long-term care and preservation planning of the archive’s digital collections and facilitate learning about community standards and practices in digital preservation.

In 2017, my colleague, Beth Jaffe-Davis, and I connected with Washington Irving Intermediate School’s 5th grade teacher, Elisabeth Hickey, to carve out our first multiweek educational outreach project. These fifth-grade students would be our first group to take part in an RAC archive project. Seven years later, we had the opportunity to reconnect with them as they wrapped up their high school careers for a Reception and Reflection where we discussed the impact of the archive project.