Uncovering How to Source Archival Materials

 Welcome. I'm your host Candace Block, and today we're gonna focus on sourcing archival materials for your projects to help us learn more about that subject. Our guest today is archival producer Sarah Katz. Sarah has worked in television and multimedia as a producer, shooter, and researcher. For nearly 20 years, she has been an archival producer with agency such as Vox Medias.

Six West Media Group and Story Syndicate. She has credits on over 40 documentaries for the History Channel, national Geographic Television Biography, planet Green, and Investigation Discovery. She routinely produces news stories about American policy with foreign journalists as part of the Foreign Press Center's media co-op program, and Sarah has also produced countless hours of educational content for the great courses covering topics from science to literature to archeology.

Welcome to the show, Sarah.

Thank you. Thank you for inviting me.

Yeah, so this is a topic that I know a lot of our listeners are gonna absolutely eat up and get a ton of value out of, we have a lot of documentary filmmakers and I know it, it can maybe go beyond that. But for listeners who may not be aware, what does an archival producer do?

Yeah. so the way I describe it is an archival producer sources third party media that is not shot by the original production. so you know, that's any photographs, film, it can be audio, documents.  I work all in non-fiction content.  so it's something that's really essential to a lot of documentary films to supplement the stories, you know, their real life stories.

And there's just huge, huge, enormous volumes of archival media that can be used in, any documentary or other types of film. And, you know, sometimes it could be things that you see in a newspaper or periodical.  there are photographs and. I sometimes compare it to that, because part of it is not just sourcing it directly from an archive  anyone who has that photo, photo agencies.

But,  it's a lot of permissions process too.

Yeah, so I was gonna say that one thing is,  nice is you have that experience, you know, not only where to look, but how to get the permission to use it in whatever project.  so yeah. How did you get into this line of work? Like when, is there any training or anything for it or is it just an accumulation of experiences or there certification like.

that's a great question.  I did get trained, so I grew up in Maine and I was working in Portland, Maine, in television production, and I discovered this fantastic. documentary production company in South Portland that worked on,  history Channel P b s shows, national Geographic, and they had a really strong archival producer there.

and,  she had been trained by a previous,  archivist. And this, this is really kind of predate. The internet. So, it was kind of night and day from how we do it now, but,  she had excellent kind of media management, excellent database skills,  just really solid,  workflows for managing media and research.

 I really did get trained at a company that,  made all the difference in terms of how, how they manage media and productions overall.  so I was fortunate in that way, but,  I teach workshops at Docs in Progress, and I've taught about four or five of them. And one thing people say to me is, this isn't taught anywhere really.

I mean, there's, there's archival science in libraries, for libraries training.  and George Washington University, I think has a library science program.  there's not a lot of training,  for archival producing in film. and I've worked with some archival coordinators recently who have, that have worked with me to support my projects.

And they also say, you know, they come from film school or journalism school and they,  mention that there's not really training like this in school.

Yeah. It sounds like it's kind of a mentor mentee type of situation or like apprentice  type thing, but maybe. Some type of training could be of benefit. Um, it's great that you do teach things as well, so you're passing your knowledge and experience and wisdom on.  in doing all of this type of work, is it something that you do working alone a lot, or do you work in teams or groups depending on the scope of the project?

 most of my work has been with teams. Most of my work is at production companies, that are like the company that I first got trained in,  they're production companies that make shows for History Channel, national Geographic, pbs.  most recently I've been working with Story Syndicate who produces for Hulu and.

 so it's often really with a team of,  producers, directors, editors, production managers.  that's usually the environment I work in. When I was in Washington, I did some consulting for two years with a.  academic department at George Mason University.  that was a smaller team.

 and I do do some freelance consulting. Like I have people contact me and ask me, for research on their independent films. But the bulk of what I do is really with production teams.

 Well that's cool. at what point would a filmmaker, especially like a smaller one, if they're starting with a doc and they're thinking, oh, I need to get. All these archival materials  and different things to start, you know, really fleshing out my piece.  at what point should they consider looking into somebody, like an actual archival producer or archivist as instead of just trying to do it all themselves?

yeah, that's a good question too. Of course, I'm going to say you should start from square one. You should start from day one. But I say that because there's a lot of complexities to archival research that you might not know if you're just digging into it.  I usually advise people not to rely on Google for their research, like not to do Google image search, for instance, or not to rely on YouTube.

 whoever posts that media  to those platforms doesn't own the rights to it. And you always wanna find the original rights holder. because if you're distributing to any large audience, you're going to need to get a license or permission to use the. And just going from Google or YouTube, you know, it's, it's detective work.

Yeah, it sounds kind of like a event or wedding planning when people say they can do it themselves and then partway through, they're like, oh, but there's all of these steps and processes and things. I should have realized someone else is more professional at handling.  

I tend to say one of the risks there too is,  you get really, really far along in your film and you might have committed to some piece of media.  you think it's going to make your film and then only to realize that the licensing fee is exorbitant or,  there's just a caveat in trying to get it, clear.

Trying to get permission.

 would you say that's the biggest roadblock, is more the permission rather than finding the content?

I do think  that is the huge challenge. I think again, because it can sometimes unfortunately be underestimated, but it is, it can be really, really challenging.  if you wanna license feature films, you know, there are different processes you have to go through and it might cost $10,000 to license a short clip.

 I do think that the clearance process and the fees involved in licensing are. The bigger challenges of research.

Yeah. And that also brings up sometimes when people think of archives, they think of really, really old stuff, and it's just any other, any of the content that is not, as you said at the beginning,  Film themselves, it can be considered this stuff. so in, we're based out of DC I know that that is one of the areas that is particularly fantastic for having resources such as like the National Archives, library of Congress, Smithsonian, things like that.

 what makes those particular places so wonderful. And are there resources for archives that filmmakers overlook often, like historical societies or things like.

Yeah.  well, of course,  I can't say enough about DC even when I was in Maine working at a production company, I went on research trips to Washington,  to the National Archives. And,  the staff there are phenomenal. they're really there to serve the public and they're so helpful and answer so many questions.

So I can't say enough about the National Archives in particular. and yeah, the Library of Congress and Smithsonian are great. But,  I really think it depends on your story. Your story is going to drive the archives that you're going to.  I a hundred percent think that local archives,  historical societies,  libraries, local museums,  those can always be amazing,  sources for archival research.

I go there, go to places like that all the time. Of course, that is historic, not necessarily contemporary, but, um, I also think that libraries are really, really helpful for research in general. Librarians are,  always there to answer questions and point you to different resources.  I would agree that historical societies and museums and universities are, over.

Yeah. And as you were, hinting at before, you know, people are very quick to just look online for stuff, but I'm sure there's a great benefit to physically going to some of these places and seeing, or,  I know you can't, like, take things out physically. So if someone is going there, say, to National Archives for example, what are some of the things they should consider when they're going?

 maybe things to bring with them  or anything.

Yeah. one thing I will also say, I'm such a proponent of going to the archives because you can find things that you don't expect.  if you have something in mind that,  you want to use in your film that you found on YouTube, that might just be one photograph in a whole,  reel of other photo or a whole, you know, lots and lots of photographs in a certain collection.

 there are definitely undiscovered, unknown. Benefits to, to going to the archives and seeing what's there, and that can really drive your story.  in terms of what to bring,  to the archives,  a lot of them have a lot of restrictions because of the delicacy of the media. So,  the National Archives does have computers you can use and you can,  bring your own computer and they have in wifi.

 you can bring hard drives there. The National Archives,  has reels of footage that you can actually. Saved to your hard drive, which is amazing.  they're usually screener quality. They're not high resolution, like broadcast quality, but they're great for research.  so I would just talk to the archives about what you should br, what you can and can't bring.

Mm-hmm.

The National Archives too, has a process for,  going through paperwork. You can only bring paperwork that they've approved.  security looks through the papers before you go up into the reading room.  and I always bring notes too.  I like to,  develop timelines, especially if I'm working on a film.

Like I'll create a timeline and maybe a list of locations,  and use those as keywords when I'm doing research. So I. Be really, really prepared in my research and think about  what areas might I discover just by using keyword searches  there's just the whole fun of going to an archive is what you don't expect to find.

Yeah, I mean there's,  two questions I have about that one, about  resolution,  quality,  I'm just curious because it is kind of a fun adventure. I've done some myself. I've been to the National Archives and done a little bit for some projects, and it is, yeah, it's amazing what's there.

Do you have any stories that stand out? Maybe you were working on a piece and as you're researching you find like new branches or avenues to kind of go down on the subject you thought you were going in.

Yeah, I mean, I think I, that happens all the time and that's what I love about it.  I can't think of a specific anecdote from the National Archives, but one that I really like to tell, I worked on a series called Deep Sea Detectives for the History Channel, and they were deep sea detectives.

They were scuba divers, investigating shipwrecks.  so my job was always to find whatever media I could on those ships before they sank. and part of one of the mysteries,  the mysteries, always how did the ship sink?  I was trying to find like a blueprint of one of these ships. It was built in the UK and in like the early 20th century, you know, like the 19 teens or, and  I found the shipyard where the, ship was built in the uk and I found their historical society and they didn't have a blueprint of that ship, but they had a blueprint of the sister ship, which was identical to the ship and it helped, the deep sea detections.

That's awesome. That's amazing. See, this is you, you get to go on all these fun detective, adventures and yeah, it sounds like,  searching through all of this stuff is, is really rewarding as well. And there's a kind of an excitement to it, even though some people might think it sounds boring.

You're like, oh no, I find all kinds of

yeah, it's so fun. It can be really, really fun.  

yeah. So speaking of though,  the quality, cuz some of them you only get, like you said, screener quality.  is there a process  to get a, a better quality? Because I know if someone's making a film, for example, they would want it to eventually be on a big screen. And so that's, something to

Yeah. And that's also a reason why,  I think it is helpful to work with a professional because for instance,  at this point I've actually worked on like 55th and  there's a very solid workflow for how to manage this archival media. And it works.  I mean, this is what I was spending my time doing today,  for the last few weeks, the process is usually, you get like temporary low resolution research files, whether it's film or video or photographs.  I guess things have changed since I started like pre-internet, but,  where you can

You're like, I don't wanna

I know I,

it's fine though. There's still a lot that's done offline, so it's at anytime.

Yeah, and there's, and to, to be honest, like there's still a lot of media that is not digitized and that's an advantage of going to the archives and working directly with the archives is because they don't always have the resources to digitize everything.

So, if you work with them, you know, they might digitize it for you. There's often a fee involved, but  you can find things that are not  on the internet.

Yeah. And it's an ongoing process to digitize them. So, you're not gonna find everything in Lance, you dig

Yeah.  so I guess some of the shows I've been working on more recently, they, the producers really do wanna get the highest quality in their cuts.  but,  the way I was trained was to get research files because  when you buy high resolution media, it's going to cost a lot of money.

So,  we get temporary files until the show is locked, until we know the show is final. And at that stage, I work with vendors like the National Archives has post-production vendors,  that they work with. Like Henninger is one of them. Color Labs, another ones. So they're these post-production houses that do national archives transfers.

 and then you can order them in 4K or HD  you can talk to 'em about whatever,  quality you need for your film.  For photographs, like I would go to the national archives and bring a scanner. That's pretty common.  you just go in and you can scan it at whatever resolution you want. They have scanners there too.

I think they might cost like 25 cents or so per scan, something like that.  there's usually a process for the films I work on that you get low resi loose media until your show is locked and then you up res So you order all the high resolution.

That's smart.  it's almost like a pre-vis or something like you or storyboarding. You kind of get it and then you're only gonna pay for what you

Yeah.

 yeah, that, that makes a lot of

And you figure out the budget along the way.

Like you're, I, I do budget estimates at every cut delivery.

how often does that happen where there's something that somebody really wants but they, it's not in the budget to get the version, so they maybe have to pick a different

Yeah. That's always a,  balance. Like that's something that I go through with. Every piece of media because, producers have a vision in mind for how they wanna tell their story. And so I'll, I might go out and get estimates on how much the licensing is.  a lot of projects I've been working on recently work really closely with legal councils and.

See if there are paths towards fair using media. that really takes a legal consultation to determine whether your editorial use falls within fair use.  and then you're not paying licensing fees.  I always say I'm not a, a legal consultant.  I'm like a middle person in between the lawyer and the filmmaker.

 that also kind of points out, are there,  different legal considerations for how the material's gonna be used? Like if it's documentary or maybe like advertising,  like I would imagine there's differences

Yeah, yeah, that's a good question too. Yeah, that's something that,  I always talk to my vendors about.  I work on,  documentaries and there are different tiers, there's different. Criteria for licensing media.  and one is the type of media like theatrical television,  internet, so it's media type,  duration of the license and territory of the license.

 and for my projects, I license for the terms all media worldwide in perpetuity.

Mm-hmm.

But that's going to be the highest licensing cost.  I license for editorial. there's different cost for commercial licensing. For advertising.  and if you were to license, for instance, like cinematic, right?

Just for North America, not worldwide, that would have a different rate than all media worldwide. Um, so there's a lot of different factors that I always talk to, any archives or  footage vendors about when I'm licensing and get the rates based on that.

Yeah, well that's, another example of why it's important to go through somebody who knows about all of these things and has the experience and, and can take those considerations. what do you think about, or organizations such as like the Society of American Archivists, are there.

 other organizations like that as well? Is that something that's a, good resource that people should look into?

 I don't know that much about the Society of American Archivists. I think it's an academic, group, maybe for,  museums. And I do know that there's a whole world of archiving within the museum realm.  I follow some of those groups. On social media,  I think I, you know, they're highly, highly respected,  for what they do.

I guess my,  specialty is working with filmmakers,  and working,  getting media. On a screen.  but  I have complete respect for those other archival groups. And  there's kind of informal archival groups. There's an archival listserv in New York. I don't know, one in dc but I have other friends who are archival producers in dc.

 Yeah, I mean, the big group I can think of is the listserv in, in New York,  there's a Washington DC based archival researchers association.  and that is not just filmmakers. There are filmmakers on it, but there's also more academic  archivists devoted to the national archives.

There are lots of, researchers and  archivists who go to the National Archives on a daily basis.  that's what they do.

Yeah, I mean, it sounds like,  to have access to a network of people, someone might be able to point you in the right direction if as, uh, an archivist yourself or, if you're just a filmmaker trying to figure out  where to go, or have suggestions for where to find things on a particular

Yeah,  I always recommend asking the archives if you,  need to access an archives that's outside of your region, you can ask them if they have researchers who can go in for you rather than you making a trip to like California,

Oh, that's, that's a, that's good. I, good advice. obviously more and more is becoming digital and there's online resources and things.  do you find that a lot of these,  resources have really good online organizing or cataloging of everything and that, is that a good place to start?

 it's always a good place to start, but it really depends on what your subject matter is. I would say there's a lot of.  historical media that might not be digitized. I'm just trying to think of some recent projects I've worked on. I worked on a show about the toy industry last year for the History Channel and  we,  were talking to some university archives,  that had like, The corporate collections of some of these toy manufacturers and they were not digitized.

 they sent us a list and  this can be complicated If you can't go to a library that has a huge collection, I mean,  it's ideal if you can go to that library. Um, but they would have like a list of the media that they had and we would just have to kind of. Take our best, guess what is gonna be valuable from that collection and then order like a research copy of it.

Mm-hmm.  you've brought up a couple examples so far, but is there any like a project that you worked on where you gathered and learned a lot about something and it just kind of sticks,  with you to this day?

Well, that's why I love my work because  it's hard to, it's hard.  I've worked on so many projects that I'm really, really proud of, and. I'll be honest, the project that I'm wrapping up right now is one of my top favorites. I mean, I, I always work with wonderful people, like I have made some amazing colleagues,  on every single project, but I'm really excited about the project that's I'm working on right now, which is releasing,  this summer on Netflix.

Are you able to talk about it or share anymore, or

hasn't been a public announcement of the title yet, so I can't say more.

Okay. Okay. Well, we will keep an eye out for that.  hopefully we can, when it does come public, you can maybe let us know and we can,  tack it on to the show notes or something,  and let everyone know.

 I mean, it sounds like. This career has been really cool, and it's a way to learn a lot about a lot of different topics.  and,  diving deep into the research is kind of like a,  you're almost getting like a free degree or getting paid to learn a lot about a lot of different subjects.

 if someone wanted to get into this same field, is there any advice that you would give them  if they wanted to do what you do? Because you've talked so highly of it. It, I mean, I'm curious about it now too.

yeah.  I always wanna encourage people who are curious to pursue what they're passionate about. and I think, doing research have, having that innate curiosity We'll, do you, well, I guess if you wanna pursue that because you have to, you have to do investigative work and there's a lot of media management, I would say.

 understanding media management and rights and clearances is,  really important. And like we were talking about earlier, kind of overlooked. So if you have those,  skills or if you want to learn,  it's good to kind of take. Roles and,  get your foot in the filmmaking industry.  actually, somebody did say to me recently that this is the work of God.

I think because I am the middle man with legal teams a lot, and I do a lot of like logging.  it's not always glamorous, but it's, it, it's fun. A lot of,

Yeah, it sure sounds fun and interesting.  you can't talk about the project you are currently working on.  but are there projects you can talk about that are recent that we should keep an eye out for  that?  we can point to it and be like, Hey, Sarah helped get

Yeah, I'm well.  I worked at a and e last year, and so I worked on two big series there. It's the built series and they have, they kind of have spinoffs on all of these different topics, but I worked on the machines that built America and the toys that built America,

Oh, that sounds so fun.

folks might know those. 

That's cool. So when you watch things now, do you ever,  look and,  either see the things that you helped get and that have a sense of pride or do you see things that maybe are on a project you haven't worked on? You're like, wow, that was a good find that whoever got that, you know?

Yeah.  I definitely have a lot of curiosity when I'm watching something for where the archival material came from.

Yeah. You've got your archivist eyes on it, always.

No, I mean, a lot of the projects I work on are very, very fast paced and I do kind of have a passion for working on projects where  the archive is doing a lot more of the storytelling.  as much as I love the projects I work on now, you know, it's, it would be great to work on really important social justice films.

That's something I would love to do.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean because archives are needed for every type of thing you can imagine. I'm sure people might originally think, oh, documentaries only, or really old stuff, or whatever. But it can be used in so many ways and it's a very important thing.  I think it's great that we as a society and a culture and a species or whatever, Document and save things,  so we can look back in our histories.

Uh, that's, that's so great.

And could I, oh, could I just add this point too about the, built series, the machines that Built America and the toys that Built America? One really cool element of that show is they were, in some cases, like bringing to life. They had actors and recreations on green screen. In historic time periods and they use some of the archive,  to represent,  to kind of be embedded in, into that, those recreations.

And I think it, there's a really cool potential for merging the archival with technology and green screen and graphics.

Mm-hmm. Oh, that's awesome. That's, yeah, that's a wonderful new, exciting potential avenue that, will utilize that. That's really cool.  I'm gonna think about that too. so if anyone wants to learn more about you or the work you've already done and or even potentially reach out about using your skills or expertise,  where can they go and how can they connect?

Yeah, absolutely. Well,  I have a webpage, katz tale.com. K a tz t a l e.com, and that has, it has my bio, it has  some clips, excerpts of projects I've worked on, and a page about my archival research and my email addresses. 

Yeah, there's a contact form on the website.

Perfect. Yeah.

And I have an IMDB page as well in LinkedIn.

Excellent. Yeah, and we'll put all that stuff in the show notes and, this has been really fascinating. I think it's a cool subject and it's, awesome that you get to make a living doing this. like I said, having done only a tiny bit of it myself, but like experiencing how neat it is to peek into the treasure trove of archives,  it's definitely something that I hope when people are listening are thinking about doing stuff, not only do they realize.

It might not be something they could do on their own.  to reach out to somebody, but to also,  realize you can tap into so much stuff to enhance your, projects. So thank you so, so much.  I enjoyed all of your knowledge and thank you for,  being,  on the podcast and sharing your expertise with

Thank you so much for interviewing me. I really appreciate it. It's,  lovely talking to you.