| Project Overview | Project Plan | Collections Uncovered | Monthly Reports | Credits | Appendices |
|---|
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As of 10/14/2022: 891 tapes digitized; 646 assets captioned and uploaded
"Uncovering CUNY's Audiovisual Heritage" aims to digitize, preserve, caption, and make accessible over 1,000 unique assets found in archival collections across the CUNY network. Roughly three quarters of the assets are from cable access programs that aired in New York City between 1985 and 2009. The project began in September of 2020 and finished in November of 2022.
Funding for project was awarded by the Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives: Enabling New Scholarship through Increasing Access to Unique Materials, a national grant competition administered by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). The initial proposal can be accessed as an appendix.
The project can also be followed on Twitter and Instagram via the #UncoveringCUNY hashtag.
The City University of New York (CUNY) is the largest university network in the country with over two dozen schools in every one of New York City's five boroughs. The chart below lists the five the schools partnering with this project, and public television collections they manage. Each collection is comprised of a series that aired between the 1980s and early 2000s, but only available on an obsolete videotape(or audiotape) format. Collectively, the content tells the story of New York City as it grapples with public policy and social justice in a delicate era just before, and just after, 9/11. Clicking through each institution will reveal a one-page description of the collections in their care.
| Institution | Collection | Formats | # of Tapes Digitized | Streaming |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Baruch College | Baruch College Special | U-matic, Betacam SP, DVCam | 175 | Youtube.Com |
| Baruch College | City Club | U-matic, Betacam SP, DVCam | 171 | Youtube.Com Archive.Org |
| Centro de Estudios Puertoriqueños at Hunter College | HoMoVisiones | VHS, MiniDV | 304 | Archive.Org |
| Centro de Estudios Puertoriqueños at Hunter College | Politics con Sabor | MiniDV | 108 | Request from Centro |
| Centro de Estudios Puertoriqueños at Hunter College | Centro Records | VHS | 65 | Request from Centro |
| College of Staten Island | Cinema Then, Cinema Now | U-matic, Betacam SP | 166 | Youtube.Com Archive.Org |
| Bronx Community College | Hall of Fame for Great Americans | VHS, 1/4" audio magnetic tape | 25 | Request from Bronx Community College |
| Medgar Evers College | Medgar Evers College Archives | U-Matic | 13 | Archive.Org |
| Total | 1059 |
The Gantt chart below visualizes the original plan for an 18 month timeline (9/1/2020 - 2/28/2022). Collections were completed self-contained cycles comprised of such tasks as cataloging, digitization, ingest, captioning, and public access. The length of time estimated is informed by the number of tapes in the collection. The timeline also indicates semesters where a student intern will assist the efforts.
In the first year of the project, monthly reports were sent to the collection managers to communicate accomplishments and setbacks. Final preservation reports on each collection can be found in the 2-Collections directory of this repository.
September 2020 | October 2020 | November 2020 | Decemeber 2020, January 2021 | February 2021 | March 2021 | April 2021 | May 2021 | June 2021 | July 2021 | August 2021 | September 2021CUNY TV
Kelly Haydon, Project Manager
David Rice, Director of Archives
Catriona Schlosser, Archivist
Michael "Flip" DiFillipio, Engineer
Eric Silberberg, Graduate Intern (Spring 2021)
Aida Garrido, Graduate Intern (Summer 2021)
Liza Kastrilevich, Graduate Intern (Spring 2022)
Brian Dunbar, Graduate Intern (Fall 2022)
Collection Managers
Cynthia Tobar, Assistant Professor/Head of Archives, Bronx Community College
Lindsay Wittwer, Digital Archivist, Centro de Estudios Puertoriqueños at Hunter College
Jerry Carlson, Host of _Cinema Then, Cinema Now_ and
Tom Gubernat, Media Archive Technician, Charles Evans Inniss Memorial Library, Medgar Evers College
CLIR 2019 Proposal
CLIR 2019 Budget
City Club Inventory
Rights, Ethics, and Reuse Statement
2020 Emergency Relief Fund Narrative
2020 Emergency Relief Fund Budget
*When a cassette tapes turns into a lightning bolt, 32 tapes have been digitized. "Captioned" can mean either auto-captioned or manual review by a human.