Museum of Television and Radio

first-time ASB host
see mtr.org

The Museum of Television and Radio was a first-time ASB host organization this year and three SI students spent the week working on a variety of projects there. In addition to the work, one MTR supervisor (an SI alum!) gave the students an in-depth, behind-the-scenes tour of the entire Museum.

Nadia Seiler, who was familiar with the Museum as a visitor from when she lived in New York, worked in the Library Services Department and spent the majority of the week going through close to 100 unidentified tapes of television programming. Her tasks involved watching the beginning segments of the tapes and gathering enough information to identify the program. She performed title, keyword, subject, and person queries in the catalogue database to locate matches in the program summary information of records to find unique episode identifiers. She noted accession numbers associated with these programs (found through the catalogue) in an Excel spreadsheet so that MTR staff can link the bar codes of these tapes to the appropriate record.

Knowing that Nadia is an ARM student, her supervisor also charged her with preparing an inventory of materials related to Welles Hangen, an NBC reporter who disappeared in Cambodia during the Vietnam War. While such materials do not normally fall into the museum's custody, NBC was interested in using some items in an upcoming exhibit.

Zheng (Jessica) Lu worked in the Research Services Department where she checked in the subscribed serials and prepared them for routing. She also helped answer incoming reference questions and processed relevant, contemporary news articles by reading clipping and copying them for tagging.

Kristen Motz also worked in the Research Services Department where she did a great deal of clerical work, reading newspapers and clipping articles about television, radio, and the entertainment field in general, then photocopying the clipped articles for microfiche processing later on. She also did intensive research for the many people who contacted the Museum: documentary film producers, authors, the general public, movie script writers using television in their production, etc., which she thoroughly enjoyed.

• “Learning how to spot nuances in programming and know what kind of information would stand out as 'unique' in a program description was extremely valuable.”
• “[B]ecause of their emphasis on public programming, museums may actually be a better fit for me professionally than traditional archives.”
• “The fact that the museum couldn't afford to subscribe to the database and has to do all this duplicate efforts is disheartening for me to envision a career in non-profit.”
• “I loved doing the research. The questions were fascinating and the subject matter matched my own personal interests.”
• “...photocopying for long periods of time wasn't the easiest assignment. Still, I would do [the internship] again in a minute.”

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