Home Made Visible: partnering with a film festival to preserve IBPOC home movies

Summary:

From 2017 to 2019, the Regent Park Film Festival’s Home Made Visible project, in partnership with Charles Street Video and York University Libraries, aimed to highlight the personal histories of Indigenous, Black, and people of colour (IBPOC) communities in public memory through engagement with archives, research, artistic creations, and public programming. The project’s goal consisted of  celebrating the joy captured in home movies, preserving these histories, and exploring how archives have the power to shape who we become and how we relate to one another. 

Funded by the Canada Council for the Arts’ New Chapter program, HMV produced seven commission filmed from IBPOC artists, organized a tour of fifty-one exhibitions, workshops, screenings, and installations across Canada, and thirty six families donated nearly three hundred home movie clips to the Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections for research, access, and preservation in in perpetuity. The collection spans six decades documenting the everyday life of twenty-five IBPOC communities and features weddings, community picnics, holiday celebrations, cultural traditions, birthday parties, school performances, snowstorms, and trips around the world. 

This presentation will highlight the project’s challenges, successes, and lessons learned including developing new partnerships and collaborative approaches to acquisitions and description. Topics covered will include metadata schemas and interoperability between platforms, digitization standards, donor’s privacy and copyright concerns, and workflow logistics.

Presenters:

Katrina Cohen-Palacios

Katrina (MI, MMSt), an Assistant Archivist at the Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections, York University Libraries. She is a graduate of Concordia University and the University of Toronto with experience working in academic archives and the cultural heritage institutions. 

For more information or to view the presentation slides, visit Home Made Visible: Partnering with a Film Festival to Preserve IBPOC Home Movies on the York Space Institutional Repository.