In order to maintain their status as an official AMIA student chapter, every year, each chapter must submit a report summarizing their activities to the Education Committee and the AMIA Board. These students show great promise in becoming leaders in the field, and we would like highlight some of the extraordinary activities the students organized and/or were a part of in 2016 and 2017. If you’d like to read the full reports you can find them on each chapter’s page here, Student Chapters.
University of California, Los Angeles
The UCLA Student Chapter organized tours of local archives, including the Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library, the Disney Film Archive, the A/V Conservation Department at the Getty Research Institute, and the UCLA’s Film and Television Archive in Santa Clarita. The Chapter also partnered with the Los Angeles Archivists Collective and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Department of Educational Initiatives to host the Archeology of Moving Image Workshop designed to introduce archivists to the world of moving image archiving and preservation.
The NYU Chapter organized APEX 2016 in Santiago, Chile, “to work with two local institutions: Biblioteca Nacional de Chile and Señal Tres La Victoria. At Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, a team of APEX participants worked to inspect films in their collection and set up a telecine. At Señal Tres La Victoria, a community television station, others worked to inventory their videotape collection and set up a digitization station. APEX participants also organized a community archiving workshop held at Señal Tres La Victoria. The trip cultimated in a series of roundtable discussions open to the public, in which information was shared on how to best face the challenges of managing and preserving audiovisual materials in Latin American archives.” More information about the trip can be at: https://apexsantiago.wordpress.com/
The University of Rochester Chapter took a trip to Toronto where they met with the University of Toronto’s AMIA Chapter, and visited the U of T’s film archive and TIFF’s archive and reference library. They also traveled to Cooperstown, NY to “inspect, inventory, and evaluate a film collection for possible acquisition by the University of Rochester.”
“Continued from the previous year’s programming, we were able to provide a few free film screenings in the Moving Image Research Lab’s (MIRL) private screening room at McGill for SIS students. As part of the screening series, we hosted two pre-recorded webinars on the basic principles of multimedia digitization as applied to sound and moving image.” The McGill Chapter has also been working with MIRL to preserve and catalog their collection of films.
The UT Austin Chapter planned tours of the Lyndon Baines Johnson paper and audiovisual archives, the Briscoe Center for American History, and Austin Public, the oldest U.S. public access station still in operation. They also organized a screening event held at the Bullock Texas State History Museum, which examined archival footage documenting the character known as the Texas Ranger, and a 35mm archival film screening of CREEPSHOW, presented by the archivists at the American Genre Film Archive.
The UVA Chapter was on hiatus for the 2015-2016 school year, but the 2016-2017 Chapter is excited to be up and running again. They’ve been holding regular meetings, social events, and screenings, and are busy planning archive visits and talks with academic and industry professionals.
In 2016, the University of Toronto Chapter completed their first year as an AMIA student chapter! During the past school year, they have done an excellent job mentoring and collaborating with the brand new Ryerson University AMIA Student Chapter, and held exchange visits with the University of Rochester’s AMIA Student Chapter.
Throughout the year, the U of T Chapter organized tours of Innis Town Hall, Vtape, the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (CFMDC), and Television Ontario (TVO). They also held a workshop on Video Preservation with Mark Pellegrino, Media Specialist at Media Commons (University of Toronto Robarts Library).
The Simmons College Chapter also completed their first year as a student chapter in 2016!
“To introduce ourselves, we hosted an informational meeting and screened shorts from Orphans in Space: Forgotten Films from the Final Frontier (NYU Orphan Film Project, 2012), replete with 3D glasses for everyone to fully enjoy Lillian Schwartz’s Galaxies (1974) and UFO’s (1971)… For our second event, we hosted a conversation with our new faculty member, Janet Ceja, about her latest work on revolutionary cinema in Latin America… Two of [Santiago] Álvarez’s documentary short films were screened: Now! (1965) and 79 Primaveras (1969).”
Thank you to the students for your hard work, creativity, and passion in organizing and carrying out these activities. We look forward to seeing more from you this next year, and hearing from our newest chapters, Ryerson University and Emerson College!
AMIA Education Committee 