Every year, Vtape is lucky to receive funding for one or two Young Canada Works in Heritage Organizations positions through the Canadian Museums Association. Since June, we have had two fabulous students from the University of Toronto’s Master of Information program and TMU’s Film & Photo Preservation & Collections Management program working on a whole range of tasks related to our video catalogue and research materials. Meet Brody Weaver and Janina Malipitan! We asked them to write something about the work they’ve been doing:

Hi! We’re Brody Weaver and Janina Malapitan, and we’re Vtape’s Young Canada Works Collections Management Assistants for this summer.

This summer we worked primarily with the video works of two artists: Mike MacDonald (artist no. 028) and Kyoko Michishita (no. 2137). Our tasks included the inspection, cleaning, and digitization of the respective artists’ works on video formats like U-Matic, ½” open reel, VHS, and Betacam. We also conducted research and experiments on a preservation technique known as tape baking.

Janina Malapitan is a film preservation student in Toronto Metropolitan University’s master’s program, Film + Photography Preservation and Collections Management. Janina’s forthcoming research concerns decentralized archival methodologies in resource-scarce environments, with a focus on Philippine archival practices as they relate to experimental films produced in the country between the 1980s and ’90s.

Brody Weaver is a writer, media artist, and archivist-in-training living and learning between Halifax, NS and Toronto, ON. She is in the MI program at the University of Toronto, studying Archives and Records Management with a collaborative specialization in Women and Gender Studies. From 2024-25, Brody was the Digital Archivist at the Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative, and since moving to Toronto, she has worked as an Education Consultant for The ArQuives. Her writing and art can be found in C Mag, Femme Art Review, Peripheral Review, Visual Arts News, and Wikipedia.

Photos:
1. Brody (left) and Janina (right) in front of a Mike MacDonald tape they helped to digitize
2. Collage of stills from various digitized works this summer
3. A peek into the U-Matic deck 🐸
4. A very high-tech piece of tape baking equipment (food dehydrator)
5. A Japanese-language cartoon how-to guide for handling ½” open-reel tapes, found inside multiple Kyoko Michishita tape cases
6. Time code notes handwritten by Mike MacDonald, inside the cassette case for source materials used in channel A of his 1999 video installation Medicine Tent

Vtape is grateful to the Young Canada Works program for its ongoing support of Vtape’s collections-management activities.