SASL Newsletter - Spring 2020 Issue Issue 17 - Spring 2020 | Page 9

Deaf community about the importance of attending such events for socialization and political
purposes. Finally, the demonstration of business ownership and craftsmanship reinforces Deaf
people's capacity as well functioning citizens of society and that other members in the Deaf
community should follow suit.
We now would like to talk about the newest development with our Deaf Folklife in Films
project. The Community Archiving Workshop (CAV), a project of the Association of Moving Image
Archivists (AMIA) in collaboration with the Mid-Atlantic Regional Moving Image Archives (MARMIA)
invited us to be a workshop partner in hosting a pre-conference hands-on workshop for AMIA
Conference attendees at the Baltimore Museum of Industry in Baltimore, Maryland on November
13, 2019. This collaborative effort provided a unique opportunity for us to visualize new approaches
to community-based archiving. We had an excellent opportunity to observe how volunteer archivists
utilized tools and methodology to catalog the endangered moving image collections and assess the
conditions of various media ranging from 16mm, regular 8mm and Super 8mm films to analog video
formats (VHS, Beta, and Hi8). One of many accomplishments from this community-based
experiment is a detailed inventory of the private family media collections that we brought to this
workshop for processing.
We are excited at seeing the potential of further collaboration with such professional
organizations to provide regional workshops that will empower traditional Deaf school archivists and
independent Deaf community members with networking resources and cataloging tools for
preserving endangered sign language films and videos. We imagine that many of you have
recollections of such materials. If you do not, we recommend you dig through your attics or
basements, and you will be surprised at what you may uncover. By finding more source material, we
gain more access into the unique nature of home movies, which serve as a window into the
activities and interests of Deaf people in the past.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The Deaf Folklife Films project is the result of the support over a number of years from various organizations, including Gallaudet University Alumni Association.
The HSLDB project is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF Research Grant BCS1455756 to Ted Supalla) and from fellowships to Ted Supalla
from the National Endowment for the Humanities. We would like to thank Stephen Holland, Sam Supalla, and Andrew Byrne for their assistance with editing this article.
Finally, we want to express sincere appreciation to the families who share their home movie collections as part of the Deaf Folklife Films research project.
The Power of ASL
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Spring 2020 – Issue 17