A Collaborative Model of Building Research Resources - the Media History Digital Library

Participant(s):

David Pierce, Media History Digital Library Eric Hoyt, University of Wisconsin-Madison Luci Marzola, University of Southern California

Summary: The Media History Digital Library (MHDL) has created a new model for access, digitizing a broad range of out-of-copyright magazines and books covering motion pictures, broadcasting and recorded sound, under an open access model. This panel will discuss the MHDL’s collaborative model, along with the curation of collections, the web services to make those collections available, and case studies of how the materials are used by researchers and educators. The speakers will also address the challenges of leading a project without any full time staff and invite suggestions from conference attendees for ways to improve the MHDL collection and user experience.

Providing Joint Access to Europe’s Film Heritage: The European Film Gateway

Participant(s):

Julia Welter, Deutsches Filminstitut

Summary: The European Film Gateway (EFG) is a web portal giving free access to digitized film and non-film collections from currently 38 European cinémathèques and film libraries. For EFG, the contributing archives collaboratively addressed key issues for access to digital content, such as technical and semantic interoperability of metadata, harmonization of multilingual data and best practices for rights’ clearance and IPR management. The presentation will focus on experiences with the complex tasks of enabling access to distributed and diversely structured archival content and information and will give insight into lessons learned.

A Digital Library of Film Documentation: The Internet Archive’s Projects and Partners

Participant(s):

Dimitrios Latsis, Internet Archive

Summary: The Internet Archive has been a leader in digitization, metadata curation and collection building within the GLAM (Gallery, Library, Archive and Museum) community. Together with our university and library partners we are selecting, digitizing, curating and making discoverable petabytes worth of archival resources for the use of researchers, teachers and the general public. This presentation will delve into the background of these collaborations focusing on the analogue and digital aspects of curating film-related resources. It will cover workflows and standards for quality control, as well tools like full-text search and linked data sharing which aim to make our collections broadly discoverable and accessible.

Life begins at 45: FIAF’s International Index to Film Periodicals

Participant(s):

Rutger Penne, Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film (FIAF)

Summary: This presentation attempts to give a comprehensive overview of the history, mission, and organization of FIAF’s Periodicals Indexing Project (P.I.P.) since its inception in 1972. It surveys the various publication formats of its main publication, the International Index to Film Periodicals, over the past 45 years, and discusses recent developments.

From cataloguing items toward collections’ archival and museum-type representation

Participant(s):

Laurent Bismuth, Centre national du cinéma et de l'image animée (CNC) Martine Vignot, Cinémathèque française Jacques Ayroles, Cinémathèque française

Summary: In 2011, the CNC and the Cinémathèque française decided to design a collaborative digital portal on film heritage in France, based on their analysis that current databases and catalogues no longer fulfilled the needs of their users. Meeting expectations from both staff and users required the establishment of a strong, organic interaction between « film » and « non -film » collections, and the building of an integrated information system for a network of institutions charged with preserving and making the collections available. The goal was to lose the information silo approach in order to build a genuine Knowledge Base, taking into account new objects of description. This presentation will show how linking the documents (posters, photographs, archives, drawings and sketches, etc.) and valuable items (costumes, sets, machines and devices) with the cinematographic work led to a change of paradigm - from library science to a film heritage collection, museum-type approach.

‘The Most Important of All the Arts’? Methodology and Mapping in the Study of Soviet Feature-film Studios through Paper-based Archival Collections

Participant(s):

Alexander Graham, University College London

Summary: This presentation will explore some of the practical and methodological challenges facing cinema historians whose work examines the history of Soviet feature-film studios in the post-war era. Drawing on current doctoral research working with paper-based archival collections in Russia, it will discuss how Russian state archives format studio-specific collections that span networks of professional film production, informal ideological screening and official state political authority. Consequently, it will assess the functionality of their catalogues and ask how the management of these rich film-historical resources might transcend their current arcane status to encourage greater exploitation by researchers.

Transcending Hollywood: A Study of the International Collections Archived by the Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library

Participant(s):

Matt Severson, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

Summary: While the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was partly founded on the notion of preserving the history of the American studio system, it is not widely known that the organization has a much broader range of materials in its holdings that originate far beyond the borders of Hollywood. This paper will discuss key international collections the Academy has acquired over the years, including the Satyajit Ray papers, the Richard Koszarski Polish poster collection, the Stephen Chin collection on kung fu films and others, and discuss the Academy’s current global mission toward collecting and preservation.

Online, in venue, on show: Transforming Access to the BFI’s Collections

Participant(s):

Sarah Currant, British Film Institute Nathalie Morris, British Film Institute Emma Smart, British Film Institute

Summary: In 2011, the British Film Institute underwent a radical reorganization as it became the lead body for film in the United Kingdom. At the heart of its new vision was a commitment to open up access to the collections the BFI holds on behalf of the nation and to provide innovative ways of interpreting and understanding them. This presented the Collections and Information department with a unique opportunity to turn around the decline in visitor numbers to the BFI library by building a new modern library for the 21st century at the BFI’s cultural complex on London’s South Bank, as well as modernize the way the public could access information about the collections through the development of one integrated collection database. The panel will address the key phases of this multifaceted project.