Mellon Awards $300,000 to Support Preservation of Community Audiovisual Collections in Mid-Atlantic Region
[Baltimore, MD, 5/9/2024] – The Mid-Atlantic Regional Moving Image Archive (MARMIA) is pleased to announce that we recently received $300,000 from the Mellon Foundation. Mellon’s support will fund a two-year project, Interface: Expanding Personal and Community Archiving in the U.S. Mid-Atlantic, aimed at empowering individuals and institutions with the knowledge and resources necessary to help ensure the longevity of the audiovisual materials within their collections.
As part of this project, MARMIA will offer training and digital preservation services to participating individuals, libraries, and organizations free of charge, with an emphasis on safeguarding and sharing the diverse cultural heritage found within audiovisual collections throughout the Mid-Atlantic region. This includes hosting Community Archiving Workshops at partnering libraries and organizations in order to help catalog and identify those materials most at-risk, and helping set priorities for their digital preservation. Additionally, we will offer specialized training to public library Memory Labs in an effort to bolster personal and community archiving efforts across the region.
Funds will be used to overhaul MARMIA’s preservation lab, expanding the digitization and digital preservation services our organization is able to offer, while simultaneously increasing the lab’s overall bandwidth. This includes the purchase of a new 4K film scanner, in addition to server upgrades and the addition of LTO backup solutions. These upgrades will in turn be utilized to offer digitization of film and videotape formats free of charge to participants.
Ashley Minner Jones, a community-based visual artist from Baltimore and an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, recently had a family VHS videotape transferred by MARMIA staff. “MARMIA gave me back my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, my parents when they were young, and a glimpse into my own youth. My heart is so full,” Ashley said after watching the digitized video. “Beyond that, they’ve preserved these moments for our culture. You can hear our accents (folks who migrated from points way south to Baltimore for work, and their kids, and their grandkids), see what we were eating (crabs, of course!), and wearing (I saw my New Kids On The Block shirt), how we gathered and where, what my dad felt was important to record and what’s going on in the background. What a time. What a gift.”
MARMIA is thrilled to be able to share this gift with others beginning this upcoming summer. A number of free digital transfer appointments will be made available to community archives and individuals over the next two years. “We are deeply grateful to the Mellon Foundation for their generous support of our mission to preserve and provide access to the rich audiovisual heritage of the Mid-Atlantic region,” said Siobhan C. Hagan, Founder and CEO of MARMIA. “This grant will enable us to strengthen our commitment to community and people-centered preservation efforts in Baltimore and beyond.”
Please contact MARMIA’s Technical Coordinator Austin Miller for more information about the project: austin@marmia.org
About the Mellon Foundation
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Since 1969, the Foundation has been guided by its core belief that the humanities and arts are essential to human understanding. The Foundation believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, and that everyone deserves the beauty, transcendence, and freedom that can be found there. Through our grants, we seek to build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive. Learn more at mellon.org.
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