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The Past Is Present UCLA is dedicated to preserving global cultural heritage, so we may better understand today’s world and our place in it.

By Mary Daily • Photography by Spencer Lowell

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World Music

UCLA’s renowned Ethnomusicology Archive is devoted to the study of living musical traditions around the world. The collections include more than 150,000 audio, video, print and photographic items that document every form of musical expression. Schoenberg Hall’s World Musical Instrument Collection displays represent every country on the globe.

Part of the Gamelan Room is filled with instruments from various world musical traditions taught at UCLA.

William McNamara, a senior ethnomusicology major, practices the sitar in the India Room.

Donna Armstrong plays the gyil, a xylophone with gourd resonators, native to Ghana.

Right: Paul Bancel, archive technician, cleans the recorder in the music digitization lab.

The recording captures audio files for archival cloud storage.

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Moving Image

The UCLA Film and Television Archive, the nation’s second-largest moving image collection after the Library of Congress, boasts the largest nitrate-safe storage facility in the West, where highly flammable films made before 1951 can be safely kept and cataloged. The facility, whose monumental design pays tribute to the critical nature of its work, is provided through the generosity of film lover David Packard and the Packard Humanities Institute. It is located north of Los Angeles in Santa Clarita.

Collection services processing conservator Yesenia Perez in a safety film vault.

Preservationist Brian Belak performing the painstaking work of saving fragile film.

The Archive includes more than 350,000 motion pictures, 170,000 television holdings and 27 million feet of Hearst Metrotone News newsreel footage.

  • 27 million feet can be compared to driving across the United States almost twice.
  • 5,000 hours — 208 days of 24-hour viewing — would be required to watch 27 million feet of film.

The oldest holdings in the collection are paper prints of movies from the 1890s.

Senior newsreel preservationist, Jeffrey Bickel, inspects the original film negative of the Hindenburg disaster of 1937. The positive shows part of the film that was captured during one of the greatest catastrophes in aviation history.

Clockwise from upper left: The monumental exterior of the archive facility; the HVAC system controls the environment in the nitrate vaults; the hallway to the nitrate vaults, measuring longer than a football field; nitrate film deteriorating in the can, which makes it even more flammable.

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WORKS ON PAPER

Library materials that circulate often show the wear of frequent handling. To remain accessible, they must be carefully tended. That’s the work of the preservation lab in the basement of Powell Library, where staff members are experts in library science, conservation, book binding and repair. Their goal always is to return materials to the library to serve the needs of students and scholars.

The flaps in this historic anatomy book in the UCLA Library Special Collections, which represents the human body and its organs, are being reinforced to make the book last as a teaching tool.

Delicate shell art created by Japanese Americans at Tule Lake Internment camps in California is placed in new boxes for safe storage.

This first American edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in 1899, is being carefully restored and strengthened to withstand the rigors of use by students.

Conservator Chela Metzger uses a bookbinding paring knife to thin the edges of leather atop a lithography stone. In the lab, new leather is used to fill losses in old leather bindings and occasionally to rebind a book.

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MATERIAL CULTURE

The UCLA/Getty Interdepartmental Program in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage is the only academic program in the West dedicated to archaeological and indigenous materials. These include the physical objects and artifacts of a society or group of people — what they produced and used in their daily lives. This is one of the few sources for learning about the people, their habits and the time and place in which they lived.

First-year conservation student Fernanda Baxter inspects ancient objects in need of repair.

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Credits:

Photography by Spencer Lowell