Conservation Assessment of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research's Audiovisual Collections

FAIN: PG-51128-11

University of Wisconsin, Madison (Madison, WI 53715-1218)
Vance L. Kepley (Project Director: May 2010 to August 2012)

Hiring a consultant to assess the preservation needs of the audiovisual collections at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, which houses 15,000 film, theater, radio, television films, videos, and sound recordings, as well as two million still images on cinema and theater history dating from 1930 to 1970.

This grant will support a conservation assessment of the audiovisual collections curated by the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (WCFTR) conducted by Josef Lindner (Chief Preservation Officer, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Archive). The WCFTR's holdings in the fields of film, television and theater are of vital artistic and historic importance, and include the records of the United Artist Corporation, as well as smaller collections, like those of Kirk Douglas, Agnes Moorehead, Donald Trumbo, David Susskind, Ed Sullivan, Moss Hart, and Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. This project is the first step toward ensuring that the moving images, sound recordings, still photographs and graphic publicity materials held in our collections will be accessible to present and future scholars, artists and members of the interested public.