Confessions of a Film Preservation Assistant

It's pretty common for students to have on-campus jobs. Some work at the gym or the dorm front desk. If you're like me, you might work at the library. However, my job isn't about organizing books or anything like that.

I work as a preservation assistant in the audio visual department at the Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas. On a day-to-day basis, I get to watch and prepare old film reels for long-term storage.

It's a very fun job, especially as a film student. I enjoy watching these films, even though they're mostly sports footage and non-narrative films. It's interesting to learn about the work that went into creating and viewing this medium before the digital era.

My job requires me to use the technology from that time (a turntable known as a Steenbeck) to make sure that films are still in good condition. Occasionally, I need to make cuts where masking tape was used to piece strips together, replacing it with tape that is meant for the medium.

I've also learned the importance of film preservation. In the early days of film, it was common for studios to get rid of reels once they were no longer needed. Thousands of films from the early twentieth century have been lost. These are pieces of art that a lot of passionate creatives put their soul into, only for them to be lost to time.

Today, we live in the streaming era, where it is common for films to not have any sort of physical release. Companies like Netflix and Hulu have the ability to delete anything from their platforms at any time they wish without consumers' consent.

Mega-corporations shouldn't get to decide what gets to be history.

It's also important that smaller works get preserved too. A lot of the films I watch at my job are sports clips mainly used by the university. Some have a few minor athletes (although one had a clip of Jesse Owens in a relay), but most have unnamed and unknown athletes.

I've realized that it's important that these get preserved too. Sure, they include mostly regular people, but those people meant something, and they might still mean something to someone. We'll always need some reminder that the people of the past were much like us. That means we'll have to preserve something that doesn't seem to matter now, but could one day.