Written by Casey Winkleman, second-year MLIS student working on audiocassette digitization projects and photo documentation of original AV housing in the UCLA Preservation Lab.

The team working together on the Mazer Conservation Volunteer Day.

For non-profit archival organizations, taking a participatory approach to archiving can lead to prosperous results. In Fall 2019, I had the unique opportunity of co-facilitating a community conservation archiving event between two organizations I work with: the UCLA Library Preservation Department and the June L. Mazer Archives. The Mazer Conservation Volunteer Day was funded by the Foundation for Advancement in Conservation, and the UCLA Audiovisual team generously donated their time and expertise during the FAIC Conservation Volunteer Day on November 8 at the Mazer Archives. Thinking back on this event now, the memory of the shared work and experiences of this day are deeply resonant in a world shaped by the global pandemic.

Experts in community-based archival theory, Andrew Flinn, Mary Stevens, and Elizabeth Shepard, note that one of the defining characteristics of community archives is the active participation of a community in documenting and making accessible the history of their particular group/and or locality on their own terms (Andrew Flinn, Mary Stevens, and Elizabeth Shepard, “Whose memories, whose archives? Independent community archives, autonomy, and the mainstream” Archival Science 2009 1-86, 73). The June L. Mazer Archives is a community-based archive that does just that—the dedication on the part of volunteers involves collecting, preserving, and sharing their unique collections of lesbian and feminist materials in a decisive, collaborative style. The Mazer Archives has grown to be the largest major archive dedicated to the preservation of lesbian and feminist history and culture on the West Coast. Since its founding in 1987, the Mazer Archives has flourished thanks to the dedicated work of its all-volunteer board and community members. In 2008, the Mazer Archives established partnerships with UCLA Library and the Center for Women’s Studies that continue to this day. Many archival collections of the Mazer Archives were given to the UCLA Library with the hope that they could be accessed by a broader range of archival users.

I began working with the Mazer Archives as a Mellon-funded UCLA Community Archives Lab Fellow at the beginning of the 2019-2020 academic year. The UCLA Community Archives Lab pairs UCLA MLIS graduate students with Los Angeles community-based archives to work together for the length of an academic year. As a second-year UCLA MLIS student and a queer woman invested in expanding representation of LBGTQ+ histories, I was very excited to work with the Mazer Archives to learn how their approach to archiving overlaps, subverts, and influences traditional archival theory and practice. In my role at the Mazer, I have focused my efforts primarily on the preservation of collections comprising audiovisual materials. In addition to this work, I have been employed with the UCLA Library Audiovisual Preservation team since starting the MLIS program in September 2018. The FAIC Conservation Volunteer Day afforded the unique opportunity to collaborate across both jobs, which I found to be one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve enjoyed during my time in graduate school.

The idea to apply for the FAIC Conservation Volunteer Day grant was initially sparked by a suggestion from MLIS Professor Ellen Pearlstein. She approached former UCLA Community Archives Lab Mazer Archives intern, Julie Botnick, with knowledge of this opportunity and it was subsequently pursued by the Mazer board. Jessica Chasen, a professional conservator then working with the Getty, and currently with LACMA, was brought on as the Project Coordinator, and Julie and I served as Co-Site Coordinators. After a series of meetings with Getty conservators, Mazer board members, and UCLA Library AV Preservation Head, Yasmin Dessem, we collectively identified the following goals for the project: (1) Create an item-level inventory for audiovisual materials, (2) rehouse oversized artworks, and (3) create custom boxes for several key objects in the Mazer collections.

Temporary archival location system for Mazer AV materials.

Before inviting conservation volunteers into the space to catalogue materials at the item-level, I completed a box level inventory of the Mazer Media Room and got a sense of what types of materials were in each collection, along with the materials’ condition. In this process, I also identified priority levels for the conservation day based on rarity, material-type, and condition. I implemented a temporary color-coding archival system so we could take boxes off the shelves and put them back with ease on the volunteer day.

As I developed the schema for the inventory list, I consulted with MLIS lecturer Linda Tadic and my supervisor in UCLA Audiovisual Preservation, Yasmin Dessem, to establish a spreadsheet to capture practical, robust, and granular metadata. For the item-level inventory to be shared as a template for Mazer conservation volunteers on the day of the event, Yasmin and I designed a simple inventory schema that captured each item’s location, general AV format (audio or moving-image), specific AV format, date, title, and columns indicating whether or not the item had any accompanying paper inserts or comments worth noting.

The Mazer Conservation Volunteer Day coincided with the Western Association for Art Conservation conference, and several professional object and paper conservators signed up to donate their time and expertise. Usually, the Mazer hosts about 10 volunteers and researchers on a given Sunday at the archives. It’s a rare event to have 25 people fill the space of the Mazer Archives at one time. While space was certainly a concern during the planning stages, the limited space fueled a spirit of comradery and motivation throughout the day.

At 9AM on the day of the event, professional conservator volunteers and MLIS students were welcomed and given an overview of the day’s goals. The objects-team began working in the main archive, and I got the audiovisual team up to speed to complete the AV item-level inventory. In addition to the UCLA Audiovisual Preservation team and one volunteer from UCLA Special Collections, the rest of the volunteers were comprised of UCLA MLIS students. While many of these students specialize in Media Archival Studies, there were several who wanted to learn more about community-based archiving and audiovisual materials.

UCLA MLIS students and UCLA AV Preservation Studio team work together to complete Mazer AV-item level inventory on the Mazer Conservation Volunteer Day (Micah Gottlieb, Megan Purcell, Julia Tenanbaum, Morgan Taylor, Brian Belak, Chloe Patton)

Azatuhi Babayan (LA as Subject Fellow), Ann Giagni (Mazer Director) and Marilee France (Mazer board member) listen as Christina Bean (805 Conservation)  shares knowledge of her paper conservation expertise

The amount of work that was completed in just 8-hours of time was remarkable. In total, 120 boxes of audiovisual materials were inventoried at the item-level. This included 1,367 items comprised of DVDS, optical discs, VHS tapes, 8mm videocassettes, MiniDV, Super8, U-Matic, audiocassettes, 7” vinyl records, ¼” magnetic tape, 16mm film, BetaSP, BetaSX, and floppy disks. Previously unprotected audiocassettes were put into cases. During this process, 10 non-archival boxes were replaced with donated archival boxes.

As the only archivist currently focusing on the audiovisual collections at the Mazer Archives, I have no doubt that this amount of work would have taken the entire length of my internship to complete had I done it alone. The effort put forth by the UCLA Audiovisual Preservation team, MLIS students, and conservation volunteers amounted to an incredible amount of completed work that will not only help the Mazer secure grant funding for the AV materials, but also expand broader access and discovery to these materials thanks to the improved intellectual control over these collections.

Yasmin Dessem holds a 45-record called HIGH RISK while working on AV item-level inventory

When a mainstream archival organization agrees to steward community-based archival collections under their own roof, a responsibility to continue ongoing collaboration is established. The dedication and hard work contributed by the UCLA Library staff on the Mazer Conservation Volunteer Day demonstrated this virtue of shared stewardship and active, ongoing participation between large and small organizations. Through group archiving events, it is entirely possible for the Mazer Archives to maintain their archival autonomy and simultaneously benefit from forming positive relationships with local mainstream archiving institutions.

FIAC Conservation Day Volunteers outside of the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives

Archives have moved to remote work to ensure the safety of both their insular teams and the community at large. The power of working together as a group resonates now more than ever. While partnerships can be fostered through email communication, Zoom meetings, and other bureaucratic means, gathering in the physical space of a community archive reinforces the notion that all participants are on the same level working towards a common goal. In this case, the effort put forth by UCLA Library staff, MLIS students, Mazer volunteers and staff, and professional conservators all made an enormous contribution to the preservation and access to lesbian and feminist histories of Los Angeles and beyond. As we survive this moment together and look towards the future, the significance of these communal archival events will not be taken for granted.

For more information about the June L. Mazer Archives, visit their website at www.mazerlesbianarchives.org.

To connect with me, reach me at casey.winkleman@gmail.com.