A big announcement about our born-digital materials!

As part of an initiative to incorporate our born-digital materials into La MaMa’s Digital Collections, I am super-jazzed, over-the-moon, jubilant, and happier than any clam to announce that the La MaMa Archive has been awarded an NEH Humanities Collections & Reference Resources Grant to begin this work!

We proceed toward the goal of comprehensively sharing our production records with researchers and the public through our project Preserving Off-Off-Broadway: Expanding Access to La MaMa’s Born-Digital Materials which will preserve and improve access to the born-digital materials in our collection through a three-year cataloging project, as well as providing for access and the long-term preservation of our born-digital footage.

Link to the NEH Press Release here!

As we embark on this multi-year project, these new materials will be added on to our digital collections site, catalog.lamama.org. Alongside the current projects processing our paper and photographic collections, this new project will facilitate the cataloging of an additional 90,000 digital items; including scripts, productions notes, correspondence, design files, programs, production photos, press clippings, marketing materials, and audiovisual materials documenting productions from 2005–2015.

The born-digital files that will be cataloged and made accessible as part of this project contain the planning, staging, design, publicity and critical history of an important era of the Off-Off-Broadway movement. This era saw the transition of the dominance of physical analog records to born-digital records. This era is subject to gaps and loss not only from the passage of 20 years, but through the hiccups of early records management plans that didn’t account for things like file format obsolesce. Without continuing this important work by ingesting and processing these born-digital materials into the Archive, the uncatalogued and/or processed materials would languish unseen, be subject to data-loss and leave this historical record of vital cultural heritage incomplete. The threat here is both physical and existential, but we are excited to be able to address these issues now and throughout the course of this project, to protect these records for years to come.