Hello,

I am new to AMIA as a member and am interested in a career in Moving Image archiving and preservation. I received my bachelor's degree in Art and Film Studies at St. Cloud State University and am looking at pursuing my Master's degree at UCLA, NYU and the George Eastman House. I've been working in the production side of the film industry for the past four years in the art department but am more interested in film archiving and preservation. I'm just posting in hopes I could get advice on the difficulty in getting into these programs. I've revised a writing sample of mine, got my transcripts and are in the process of writing my letter of intent.

I've got in touch with two of my old professors and am wondering if it would be a good idea to ask a third professor or ask an art director I have worked with for the past years.

I'm also wondering if anybody has actually gone through these programs and what they liked about them. I'm also wondering of the likely-hood of getting a job straight out of these programs and are these programs worth the money or is it better to try to get an internship and work my way up.

Any other advice would be most appreciated on the subject.

Thank You.

I've moved this to Education & Training as it seems like a better fit for the topic - hope you don't mind.

There are five full-time MA programmes devoted specifically to moving image archiving that I know of: Eastman House, NYU, UCLA, Amsterdam and East Anglia (UK). In addition Charles Sturt University in Australia offers a distance learning diploma course, and there is a recently started programme in digital media archiving at a German university, but I've forgotten which; sorry. However, I do remember that you need to be bilingual to do it, as the taught delivery is part-in-German, part-English.

I think that your best bet is to think about two things: what specialism within moving image archiving you're most interested in, career-wise (technical preservation/restoration, acquisition, cataloguing, fundraising and management, subject/genre-specific or regional archiving, curatorship etc.), and the experiences of recent (as in, in the last 2-3 years) graduates coming out of the programmes. The nature of, and employability success rate of, any degree programme can change rapidly over a relatively short timescale. Someone who went through a given programme ten years ago is unlikely to be able to give you much relevant information about what it's like now. For example, I did the UEA MA in 1995-96, but since then the three lecturers who between them taught or supervised around 90% of my work have all retired or left. That department is very different now to what it was like then in terms of its specialisms and syllabus, and so my experience there is virtually irrelevant to your evaluating whether it might be somewhere you'd wish to apply to.

From my knowledge of the field, I think it's fair to say that the vast majority of graduates from these programmes who are taking them as an exit qualification (i.e. not a stepping stone to a PhD) for the field do eventually end up working in it in some shape or form. But as with all niche occupations, jobs in a/v archiving don't grow on trees, and especially not in the current economic climate. One thing I would flag up is that being willing and able to relocate across long distances during the early years of your career will definitely boost your chances.

Hey thank you for the advice, I really appreciate it.