I would guess Mr. Pytlak could point me in the right direction

Josh

Anyway, back to your topic. As you said, the link master will most likely chime in with many excellent links and wise advice, far superceding anything I can tell you, but here are a few bits and pieces I have picked up.

Indeed you can make a living in film preservation, and there are probably a few ways to go about it. One option would be to go to library school for starters. One of the archivists I know went that route and studied celluloid preservation quite extensively. I think the American Film Institute has a presevation studies program, but I can't seem to find anything on it. If you go to school at UCLA, you can volunteer at their archives, and they also have a graduate program in motion picture archiving. Here is their website: http://www.cinema.ucla.edu/5_Education/educationFR.html

I am at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and there is a great film studies program here as well as a rather large film archive. A BA in Communication Arts (The Major that has the film studies incorporated into it) with an emphasis on film history, and volunteer or workstudy time in the archive would give you a great foundation for applying for a graduate degree at a place like ucla. There is also a great film studies program at Iowa, and if you want to stay in the midwest, Madison and Iowa would be the best options.

Here is another valuable link to a Library of Congress page with links that may be of some assistance: http://www.loc.gov/film/schools.html .

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Continue to improve your knowledge base and pursue your dreams, and keep asking questions. If someone cannot or will not answer your questions, find someone who will.

In due time, you will be among the the best in the profession you choose. There is no question about it.

Note the minimum educational requirement for admission is an undergraduate degree or its equivalent. So you should consider getting your Bachelors degree in a field that will apply to film archiving, perhaps library science, film studies, film production, or image science. You might contact organizations and people working in film preservation to see what they suggest. Here are some links:
http://www.cinematographer.com/article/mainv/0,7220,31533,00.html
http://www.amianet.org/
http://www.eastman.org/16_preserv/faculty.html
http://www.eastman.org/16_preserv/institut.html
http://www.rit.edu/~661www1/
http://www.cinema.ucla.edu/text/default.html
http://www.usc.edu/isd/archives/arc/
http://www.afi.com/about/preservation.asp

Whatever college course of studies you choose, keep your hand in the "technical" side of film. For example, while getting my BSEE at the State University of New York at Buffalo, I worked my way through college as a projectionist and in TV repair. Look for "work-study" programs, or other jobs in the film/television industry.

------------------
John P. Pytlak, Senior Technical Specialist
Worldwide Technical Services, Entertainment Imaging
Research Labs, Building 69, Room 7525A
Rochester, New York, 14650-1922 USA
Tel: 716-477-5325 Cell: 716-781-4036 Fax: 716-722-7243
E-Mail: john.pytlak@kodak.com
Web site: http://www.kodak.com/go/motion

In addition to John P's excellent advice, I would add the following from my own experience.

Point 1: you need to really want to go down that career path and be prepared to spend a long time gaining both academic qualifications and vocational work experience. IMHO, both are equally important.

In my case it was nine years from leaving school to finally landing a position as a full-time, paid film archivist. I became interested in this area from taking an undergrad degree in history and running my college film society at the same time. A lot of my early technical knowledge was self-taught, but after graduating I worked as a projectionist at the National Film Theatre in London (all changeovers, lots of weird formats and nitrate - great experience) and then took a specialist masters' degree in film archiving at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England (which at the time, 1995-96, was the only other such course in the world besides the George Eastman House degree).

Having completed this I was unable to land a film archiving job straightaway but armed with a masters' degree, I was able to secure research council funding to research and write a PhD thesis on film and history, whilst continuing to work as a projectionist at the local rep cinema in the evenings (partly because I needed the money and partly to keep my technical skills up to scratch). When I finished that in 1999 there were still no archive jobs going. Most of these organisations are public sector and a new government had just come in which froze public spending and cut it in the area of libraries, museums and archives. So I then had to work full-time as a projectionist for almost two years after that, whilst continuing to research, write and attempt to get my work published, before I finally landed an archiving job in April 2001.

Point 2: 99% of archive jobs aren't anything like as high-profile or as glamourous as the feature film restorations carried out by people like Kevin Brownlow and Robert Harris. I've just spent the last week preparing elements of a 1940s 16mm instructional film on how to milk a cow for having a new negative and telecine transfer made! But in many ways that's just as valuable in terms of social history as restoring the colour to a Hitchcock masterpiece (a farmer I consulted told me that this film shows a now obsolete method of cow milking, which makes its preservation even more important).

I think I'd be safe in saying that as a general rule, technical positions in archives are slightly easier to secure than the policy-making and administrative posts that arts graduates tend to go for, as most people who are attracted to archive work tend to come from that sort of background. If I mention to one of my colleagues that a film is interesting because it has a shuttered unilateral variable area soundtrack, I can see their eyes glaze over...

But I agree with John. Competition is tough; and qualifications AND experience are both essential.

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