George Eastman Museum

The George Eastman Museum will digitize and provide free online access to a collection of audio and audiovisual recordings. The nearly 600 hours of recordings document the interviews, lectures, and gallery discussions of significant photographers, actors, filmmakers, scholars, curators, and critics who have influenced the study of visual culture over the past seventy-five years. Building on a previous IMLS-funded digitization project, the museum will reformat the recordings, which currently require technologically obsolete playback equipment to access, to open-source digital formats accessible through the museum’s website. The project will support a temporary full-time project processing archivist. The digitization of the recordings will improve long-term preservation by minimizing handling and will allow the museum to provide free online access for the benefit researchers, historians, enthusiasts, and the public throughout the world.