I spend my days as a student, an employee, a volunteer, and a service-learner and it's truly rare that a week goes by without some head-cocking and questioning: what is this doing here?
Besides being an unstable and unsustainable housing environment for everything in the carton, the film should not have been accessioned in the first place. As a commercially produced film, the archive has neither the facilities to screen it nor the copyright to do so! An effort should be made to reunite the film with the creating body, and my supervisors agreed that this should be done. But who has the time for such things? And so, the film and its fabric friends were packed back up and sent away to offsite storage.
Perhaps I should be thankful that this "do it later" attitude will result in the employment of experts and trained professionals ( like myself!) later on. This problem, however, had an easy solution that would not have taken much time or cost - indeed, it would have freed the institution of another cubic foot of storage space. For some institutions this is a drop in the well, but for a cash- and storage space-strapped institution such as this one, it can really make a difference. What would you have done?
