Reformatting, Processing, and Creating Access to Selected Magnetic Tape Holdings from the Norman Rockwell Archive

FAIN: PW-50813-11

Norman Rockwell Museum (Stockbridge, MA 01262-9702)
Stephanie Haboush Plunkett (Project Director: July 2010 to August 2012)

Digitization of up to 264 magnetic tapes containing video interviews with Norman Rockwell's three sons, friends, colleagues, models, and studio assistants, as well as interviews and lectures about Rockwell.

Norman Rockwell Museum, steward of the largest holdings of artist Norman Rockwell, seeks a 12-month $130,000 grant to reformat 264 high-value magnetic tapes culled from a larger tape collection in its Archive. These tapes will be electronically reformatted for broad public access (to high-res MPEG-2 files, DVDs, and H.274 files that are ideal for web access). Searchable finding aids will be developed via Archivists' Toolkit and uploaded to NRM's website; finding aids then will be deposited in national collaborative archives/repositories with freely accessible web-catalogs. The tapes include unique interviews with Rockwell's 3 sons, friends, colleagues, models, studio assistants, other artists, and interviews about Rockwell, the people he painted, etc. These tapes are becoming the most requested by biographers, authors, curators, and the press. They must be migrated to a digital format as their contents are now hidden. Reformatting will facilitate unprecedented access to their contents.