Faces and Places of Texas: Preserving and Digitizing the Institute of Texan Cultures’ Audiovisual Collections

This blog post is written by Graeme Martin our audiovisual archivist

It has been about a year and a half since I was hired as the audiovisual archivist on the ILMS grant-funded project to catalog and process the audiovisual items in the Institute of Texan Cultures Audiovisual Projection Department Records collection. The goal is to inventory and assess over 3,000 audiovisual objects, including 16mm film, U-Matic tapes, open-reel audiotapes, and open-reel video tapes. We began the project by setting up a cataloging tool and determining what technical and descriptive metadata about the assets we felt was necessary to track. The cataloging portion of the project began in December of 2022, and is at long last reaching completion. Once this step is completed, a processing plan can be created and we can begin processing this collection. Since the start of this project in October 2022, we have also hired four student workers who have assisted in the cataloging process.

Discovering the content of the materials in the collection has been an interesting and rewarding experience. Over the years the Institute of Texan Cultures created several educational videos and documentaries about people and cultures across Texas. Within the collection is not only final copies of those films, but also the unedited footage from the productions, which includes interesting interviews and footage that did not end up in the final product. Additionally, a significant amount of unedited footage of the annual Texas Folklife Festival includes footage of musical and dance performances from many groups from San Antonio, and across Texas.

Much of the material in the collection has been preserved well over the years, however there are some recurring problems that tend to arise with audiovisual materials. Vinegar syndrome is present with some of the films in the collection, just as soft binder syndrome is present with many of the open-reel audiotape. These are just two examples of preservation concerns that we have to be on the look-out for when examining audiovisual materials. Continued deterioration of audiovisual materials is a serious concern, so proper housing is of the utmost importance. Luckily, we have grant funds to digitize part of this collection, so we are able to digitally preserve some material that shows significant signs of deterioration.

Creating the catalog and determining preservation concerns have been an integral part of deciding which materials should be digitized as part of this project. We plan to digitize around 200 at-risk materials, with 70 that have already been digitized, 70 that are currently being digitized, and a third batch of material that will be sent to a vendor for digitization in the near future. As part of the digitization project, the films from the original Dome Show presentation “Faces and Places of Texas” will be digitized. The dome show is one of the most important parts of the history of the Institute of Texan Cultures and was seen by tens of thousands of people during the World’s Fair and school groups and visitors after the Fair was over.

I’m looking forward to the continuation of this project, especially to be able to provide online access to some of the digitized material.