MN MEDIA ARTS Spring Member Meetup

Minnesota Media Arts held their Spring Members meetup on March 12, 2024 at the Market at Malcolm Yards in SE Minneapolis. 

We wish to thank; Board members; Ron McCoy, James Malec & Mark Stanley for coordinating the event. Attending Members: Jeff Strate, Kathleen Laughlin, Mike Hazard, Mike Rivard, Dave Carlson, Bo McCoy and guest Sheryl Mousley. MNMA, a 501(c) (3) nonprofit organization, is supported through grants, consulting, media conversion services and memberships.

Our mission is to help artists and arts/community media organizations preserve their cultural heritage, as recorded on magnetic media, through legacy media collection management, digitization and media production services than can stream, document and archive events. 

In a short business meeting, Ron McCoy provided an eight year overview of MNMA's grants and contracted projects and ongoing office and media lab space summaries. We are still searching for affordable leased space in 2024.   

Topics discussed included...  “Mapping the Magnetic Media Landscape”, a survey being conducted by BAVC with submission due March 31, 2023, funded by National Endowment for the Humanities. This survey addresses the need for continued access to affordable, high quality media collection conversion services, especially legacy formats, EIAJ, U-Matic, VHS & Betamax and Betacam. 

MNMA is planning a summer workshop with the Pavek Museum about Community Archiving. We’ll let you all know more as the topic and dates firm up.

We did a roundtable of member’s interests and needs. The general consensus was everyone needs help with their personal collections, and MNMA as an organization needs specific volunteer support in marketing communications like the website revisions, blog and FB posts. Plus, our aging legacy technology needs constant maintenance and repair.

In 2024, we updated MNMA’s membership page and new website contact page with additional information request options. We're continuing our fall GiveMN to the MAX campaign having raised over $5,000 since 2021.

We also discussed various methods to improve audience development for both new music and legacy programs. Comments included: Updating our regular  Youtube channel Minnesota Media Arts and increasing exposure through FaceBook Identity, our website Blog Page and Linked-in Posts to Media Arts Preservation - Linkedin Group in 2022 to help drive viewer traffic and subscriptions.

Thanks again for joining us at our Spring Meetup and look for more google meetup online options or live events.