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ART 448X Videography Class Guide

Welcome!

This guide is intended to assist with you with your videography assignment on regional historians and cultural preservationists in the Shenandoah Valley. For an assignment like this, it is helpful to look into working with regional repositories as well as looking through digital archives of regional newspapers.

This guide will provide you with a list of regional archives to explore, provide you with the ins and outs of using/accessing content through digital archives, and provide you with databases to conduct research in regional newspapers.

If you have any questions, please feel free to email us at research@bridgewater.edu.

Recommended Steps

  1. Do background research on the individuals being interviewed.
  2. Do background research on the folkways/history being presented.
  3. Fill in with archival photographs of the region.
  4. Ensure that you create and retain good paperwork.
    1. Oral histories are considered high-risk materials to legally distribute in an archive setting.
    2. Photographs from archives often will require publication agreements.

Suggested Sources of Information

  • Networking among the group being interviewed! 
  • Local newspaper and news journal stories 
  • Regional journals 
  • Locally produced news segments 
  • Books and articles written by the people being interviewed 
  • Their papers if they have left them to a repository 
  • Auction catalogs 
  • Archives’ topical files on regional people and regional material culture 
  • Historic photographs 
  • Reference books