AMIA Spring 2021

Focusing on a selection of animated shorts produced by the United States Information Agency (USIA), this session will trace the path of an unprocessed group of films, starting with their creation as a U.S. product under the guise of local production across the border in Mexico, continuing with processing, preservation, and digitization at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), and ending with their potential use by researchers in the National Archives catalog. Using this example, we will investigate how the archives is a borderland serving as a site for the interplay between archivists’ resources and researcher expectations. With archival researchers increasingly expecting records to be available online or accessible in digital form, and archival institutions still working through decades of unprocessed collections, a mismatch occurs when research interest grows faster than staff are able to tackle the backlog. The films of the USIA are increasingly popular among scholars and are referenced in papers, panels, and articles. Archivists and preservation specialists at NARA have worked through processing and preservation on hundreds of titles, but many are still undescribed, and only a relatively small number have been digitized. Offering the USIA’s animated short films from Mexico as a case study, we hope to demystify and make visible the work of the National Archives and pave the way for a discussion on how to achieve the most from this valuable collection. The session will incorporate short clips from the films. Speakers will include co-chairs Heidi Holmstrom and Audrey Amidon, motion picture preservation specialists at NARA, to introduce the topic and describe the work of processing archivist Michael Taylor, who has spent the last seven years working through the backlog of USIA films. Also speaking will be motion picture preservation specialist Ivy Donnell, who preserved and digitized the Mexican cartoons, and Dr. Brian Real, an information and film studies scholar who uses USIA films in both sides of his research.