The New York City Police Museum in downtown Manhattan has artifacts dating from the city’s first settlement by Dutch pioneers, 300 years ago, to September 11 2001. It has early officer-identification forms; it has back issues of Spring 3100, a publication written by and about members of the force; and it has film and video made about and for the city’s police department, including more than 100 reels of 16mm film.

The moving-image collection is of enduring research value, writes Rachel Moskowitz, the assistant archivist at the Medical Center Archives of New York–Presbyterian/Weill Cornell. She began watching the films systematically while a graduate student at New York University’s Archival Management program, and now describes them in this “repository review” originally published in the Winter 2011 issue of  Metropolitan Archivist, a semi-annual periodical of the Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York.

(Originally published in the Metropolitan Archivist, a semi-annual periodical of the Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York.)