Search New Center for Psychoanalysis

Accessibility Script

Slide One

Hello and welcome. My name is Christine Morse, I am the Library Services Coordinator here at NCP.

In April, I presented a lightning talk, Breathing Life Into A Psychoanalytic Archive to the Society of California Archivists at their annual meeting held at the Garland Hotel in North Hollywood. 

This presentation was possible because of NCP’s Archive Committee and their commitment to preserving NCP’s legacy. Those members are: Esther Dreifuss-Kattan, David James Fisher, Joseph Aguayo, Agnes Regeczey, and Richard Weiss.

Slide Two

In 2017, NCP created a public, searchable online catalog of roughly 12K papers, lectures, letters, photos, and other ephemera. This material was grouped into 24 collections, documenting the growth of Psychoanalysis in LA. The range of material spans the late 1800s through the 1990s.  Over 1 thousand of these items were digitized and are now accessible to the NCP community and the public at large. NCP is one of the few psychoanalytic organizations in North America that offers a published digital archive.

On the right hand side of the screen you’ll see an item from the Sigmund Freud Correspondences, a letter from Freud to one of the institute’s founders, Ernst Simmel, who treated WW1 soldiers suffering from “war-neuroses and psychic trauma”, what is now known as PTSD. In this letter Freud makes mention of California, and Dr. Simmel’s work there, stating: “it is pleasant to hear that after the cruel mutilations of recent years (referencing the horrors of the war) the hydra (meaning psychoanalysis) is growing new heads.”

An important part of my work here at NCP involves amplifying the use of these collections, and I’ll now share out on some of the steps taken toward that goal: 

Slide Three

The marketing team and I worked together to reshape the archive’s welcome page, explicitly stating that the collections are open to all, including but not limited to researchers, creatives, clinicians, and curious community members within and outside of the institute.

Once the new welcome page was published, we launched a section in NCP’s newsletter entitled “A Highlight From the Archive”, centered around marking heritage and identity months and featuring content from the collections digitized materials. A link to the source material and to the archive was included in each publication, in an outreach effort to share the collections with NCP members and the outside community. 

Slide Four

Some challenges and lessons learned:

Archon, the archive software, has been sunset for several years. Library Host, the software platform responsible for managing Archon, continues to maintain NCP’s archival records in their current state, but no support is available. Continuing to use a sunset platform means NCP will face significant challenges as we add to and continue to curate our material. 

Lectures recorded on legacy formats, such as VHS, tape, and other media, are at risk! The lifespan of these types of media is typically 30 to 40 years. NCP has material from as far back as the 50s that has not been digitized and may no longer be of quality to save. Without proper preservation efforts, these educational and historical resources will be lost. Beyond preservation, transferring these talks given by NCP members and visiting clinicians, into digital form, is an opportunity for the voices and insights shared in these lectures to be accessed and remembered in posterity. 

Fiscal issues are top of mind at most institutions, and NCP is no exception. Currently, no funds are allocated for the archive. Cobbling together funding would likely come from a suite of approaches, such as investigating grant opportunities and running a donation campaign specifically for the archive. 

Slide 5

To that end, we have reached out to UCLA’s Center for Preservation of Audiovisual Heritage for support, with the idea of connecting with a second-year MLIS Student interested in fulfilling their fieldwork requirement here at NCP. If an MLIS student is available, a proposed budget for the project will be presented to the Finance Committee for discussion and consideration. Two potential initiatives could be the focus of this work:

A first initiative could focus on preserving NCPs’ at-risk audiovisual materials and making these talks available to the public. This would be impactful in two ways: it would highlight more recent NCP members' work in the field and drive new interest in NCP. Furthermore, making these valuable educational and historical materials available and accessible to the public is an important piece of democratizing access to information, particularly in the face of these challenging times.

A second initiative could focus on highlighting the work of marginalized communities in the field: opening a call to the community to collect relevant material and also working with NCP’s current archival records to improve content discoverability, such as adding search terms to catalog records, inviting a broader reach of users to see themselves reflected, beyond the historically homogeneous demographic that has comprised the psychoanalytic community. 

These are two ideas we’ve had there are numerous ideas for scopes of work

These two approaches are just a few ways in which we can take steps towards preserving and further developing NCP’s archival collections. With funding, the opportunities to shape and grow this project are numerous.

Slide 6

I’d like to thank Stella Castillo and the Society of CA Archivists’ Program Committee for hosting me at their conference. I look forward to having more opportunities to share the value of NCP’s archival collections and the rich history and educational value held within our trove of materials!