Call for Applications for Digitization of Amateur and Home Movie Archives.

Call for Applications for Digitization of Amateur and Home Movie Archives.

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17.6.2024

Starting May 20, the Urban Media Archive of the Center for Urban History will accept free applications for digitizing amateur and home movie archives (8 mm and 16 mm).

If you have home movies on 8 mm and 16 mm film in your family archive, or if your institution, museum, or library has such films, you can digitize them as part of the project "Safeguarding Ukrainian Heritage of Amateur Films and Home Movies." To do this, send an application to [email protected] and add the following information:

  • name and surname of the applicant; 
  • name of the institution (if applying on behalf of the institution)
  • location of the archive;
  • quantity and format of films;
  • author(s) of the films;
  • description of the archive (indicate what you know about this film archive);
  • photographs of the materials (if possible).

Please write "Application for film digitization" in the subject line.

Even if you have only one film reel, please write to us and submit an application.

The digitized materials within the project will be published and become part of the digital collection of the Urban Media Archive at the Center for Urban History and the Library of the University of California, Los Angeles. After the digitization, the original archives and rights to the materials remain with their owners.

Participation in this project requires agreement to share and publish the digitized materials and willingness to collaborate on identifying and describing the films. We are also ready to consider the special wishes of the archives' owners if they contain sensitive information.

We will try to consider all applications, but since digitization and work on films is a rather laborious and time-consuming process, the organizers have the right to decide on the priority of digitization.

If you have any additional questions or consultations, please use these contacts:

The digitization is part of the project by the Urban Media Archive of the Center for Urban History, "Safeguarding Ukrainian Heritage of Amateur Films and Home Movies," supported by The Modern Endangered Archives Program.

The Modern Endangered Archives Program

A grant program of UCLA (the University of California, Los Angeles) Library that focuses on the preservation of world cultural heritage collections that are at risk of loss due to environmental conditions, political and media instabilities, inappropriate or inadequate storage, climate change, or social conflict. The MEAP funds projects that document, digitize, and provide access to endangered 20th and 21st-century archival materials, including print, photographic, film, audio, ephemeral, and digital objects. The collections focus on history, society, culture, and politics, emphasizing social justice, human rights, cultural production, indigenous experiences, and scarcely documented communities.

Urban Media Archive of the Center for Urban History

The archive aims to collect, store, study, provide access to, and popularize collections and files that are often neglected by the State Archives collections. Thematically, the archive’s materials are related to urban history in its various manifestations and perspectives.

The UMA is also a place for analyzing archival data and rethinking the role of archives in society in general. We explore and seek to develop new and ingenious ways of evaluating, contextualizing, displaying, and applying different archival media and documents. The project is not about developing tools to digitize archival files. We aspire to unite the community of archivists with historians and the public.