Year In Review
2023 and beyond!
Dear Friends of the MAL,
2024 marks the MAL's 15th anniversary and of course its longevity wouldn't have been possible without your steadfast support and encouragement over the years. Our success is also due to the fact that we tend to do things a little differently--including giving year-end reviews at the end of January!
To that end...we'd like to begin by thanking Brad Feld; Google; the College of Media, Communication and Information; and the College of Arts & Sciences for their support last year which largely made it possible for us to continue to have libi striegl as our full time staff member.
Last year, libi and our volunteers gave 32 class tours and hosted an average of 75 to 100 visitors a week. We also continued to expand the types of classes we host; in addition to the college students and faculty we host, this past year we also hosted middle school, high school, and law students and we also saw an increase in film and art students. Generally, we are seeing increased representation in the MAL from a wider range of departments across campus.
Thanks to the efforts of one of our volunteers in particular, we now have five high school student interns from New Vista High School's Community Engagement Program. These students have been working on everything in the lab from cleaning and organizing to repairing and maintaining equipment. We also now have an intern from Denver University's Library and Information Science Program.
Other things we have accomplished in and through the MAL, in no particular order:
· Lori and libi presented at the Radio Preservation Task Force Conference at the Library of Congress in Washington DC. Lori gave a talk and mini workshop, “Media Archaeology: Preservation, Maintenance, and Repair” and libi presented on MAL’s collections access techniques and strategies in a panel titled “Discovering and Describing New Collections”
· Lori and libi also spent two weeks as part of the teaching team for an intensive grad course titled “Mess and Method” at the Milieux Institute at Concordia. We worked with our sister lab, the residual media depot, and a fantastic group of multidisciplinary graduate students. The course focused on ideas of maintenance and repair, and we all did a zoom week of theory-based discussion and guest lectures, and then Lori and libi travelled to Montreal to do a week of hands-on thinking
· we hosted a two-day visit from the filmmaker, archivist, and curator Rick Prelinger which included two talks and a workshop on amateur radio
· we accepted thirteen practitioner-in-residents for the 2023-24 school year; four have visited us so far, resulting in a zine making workshop, a workshop on PETSCII, a workshop on slow scan TV, and the temporary installation of the amazing "Trans-Harmonium" which was written up in Hackaday
· we welcomed new Advisory Board members and new Faculty Fellows
· we gave about 10 interviews with radio, TV, and web-based media outlets
Some things coming up that we are very enthusiastic about:
· on February 1st, we will launch a website for "Other Networks"--a cluster of projects run in conjunction with the MAL that document and experiment with networks outside of what’s now called “the internet.” We are deeply invested in trying to dig up alternative or even forgotten networks so that we can reimagine the future of the internet as the future of networks. While we publish books and articles on other networks, we are also launching an asynchronous book club, hosting events and workshops, and sharing “recipes” on how to build your own “other network.”
· we will soon be releasing a new special edition sticker and taking pre-orders for a new t-shirt design
Please let us know if you have any questions about what we've shared here or if you have any feedback for us! Otherwise, we continue to be sincerely grateful to count you as one of our supporters.
yours, Lori Emerson / libi striegl