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Few archives can hope to put their nation's entire cinema history online, but what if you could republish the contemporary documentation of the classic period of your national cinema's history?
The Media History Digital Library, an independent archival activity at <www.mediahistoryproject.org>, is digitizing the published history of American cinema, television, radio, and recorded sound for free access and download. That history includes the trade, fan, and technical magazines, year books, newsletters, and catalogues that document the progress of cinema from storefronts to a major international industry. The Media History Digital Library has illuminated issues of access and conservation, and hopefully will point the way for more online resources to be presented in ways that expand public interest in moving image collections. By the beginning of 2013, we had just under 489,000 pages online, from thousands of issues from over 100 different journals, and about 300 books.
As archival moving image collections grow older, without curation and context they become less relevant to modern audiences. In a world in which millions of films and videos are readily available online, how can we increase interest in those titles held by archives and comparatively inaccessible? I faced the issue of how to make collections relevant as Curator of the National Film and Television Archive at the British Film Institute in the early 2000s, and in the decade since, as a consultant developing access strategies for American archives. Digitizing print materials addresses a key problem, as the text in these magazines can be discovered through Google searches without the need to create metadata models. Google can search text or images from any website, but for moving images, if your video isn't on YouTube with robust metadata, it might as well not exist.
Many archives focus their collecting on moving image materials, but the interests of researchers (and the public) seldom focus exclusively on the film itself. Although the product of an industrial process, these moving image works were created in a social context documented by trade journals and fan magazines. The motion picture, television, radio, recorded sound, and live performance industries were interconnected -as actors, producers and directors moved seamlessly from one medium to another. We may think of Humphrey Bogart as a film star, but he also...