Fellows must be currently enrolled in a partner Graduate Program. Prospective Fellows may apply for the Fellowship through their Graduate Programs, in accordance with the application requirements set by their University. The process of identifying Fellows may look different for each Graduate Program, but each program will work with the Host and GBH to ensure that selection takes into account the importance of diversifying the profession by providing opportunities for students from historically marginalized communities. Prospective Fellows will also be selected based on interest in audiovisual preservation and/or understanding of the media perspectives represented by the Host. For more information about the Graduate Programs and the application requirements, see the Project Partners page.
The next round of IMLS Fellowships is expected to run from the Fall semester of 2022 through the Spring semester of 2023. Selected Fellows will be notified of their Fellowship award in the spring of 2022, and will be assigned a Faculty Advisor to supervise and support their work throughout the Fellowship. Fellows will also be matched with a Local Mentor in their region with experience in audiovisual preservation to provide additional guidance and training.
Prior to the start of the Fellowship, Fellows will be included in a series of free educational webinars over the summer of 2022 to provide basic training in audiovisual preservation concepts such as digital preservation best practice and the use of the PBCore metadata schema, as well as professional development and cultural competencies, in collaboration with the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) Pathways Fellowship program. Dates and topics for the webinar series will be finalized and posted by May of 2022.
The Fellowship will begin with with an in-person Immersion Training led by Jackie Jay, Videotape Digitization Specialist and owner of Farallon Archival Consulting, during which the Fellows will gain hands-on experience in appraisal, handling and digitization of sound and audiovisual material. The Immersion Training will run over three days, with all travel costs covered and organized by the Fellowship. Dates, location, and schedule for the Immersion Training will also be finalized and posted by May of 2022.
Following Immersion Week, Fellows are expected to work 16 hours/week on the Fellowship over fourteen weeks of the Fall and Spring semesters over the academic year, for a total of 224 hours per semester. Approximately half of that time should be spent at a digitization station will be set up in collaboration between the Graduate Program and the Host Station. Each Fellow:
- inventories and assesses the material identified by the Host Station for preservation
- digitizes the materials at the digitization station
- creates detailed catalog records for the digitized material
- collaborates with AAPB archivists to implement the AAPB’s workflow for submission of the materials into the AAPB for digital preservation, including creating proxy files, generating preservation and technical metadata, and ingesting metadata into the AAPB’s Archival Management System
- researches the significance of the collection and creates a special collection to highlight the materials within the AAPB
- writes a blog post about the collection for the station and the AAPB
- collaborates with the Faculty Advisor at the Graduate Program to document their audiovisual preservation work with the creation of a 3-5 page handbook and a video tutorial on use of the equipment for the benefit of future students
- writes a short digital preservation plan for the use of the Host Station to ensure they can properly care for and retain access to the digitized materials
Fellows will keep in touch with each other throughout their Fellowships virtually through online collaboration tools. Fellows will also attend three educational webinars over the course of the Fellowship.
Each Fellow receives a stipend for their work over the course of the Fellowship, at the rate of $23/hour for a total of $5152 per semester. Fellows will also receive travel funding to attend the AMIA 2022 fall conference.
Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellowship 