Streaming Video: A Library Staple for Modern Times
posted August 29, 2017
The days of college students poring over books in library stacks, seeking inspiration in leaps within and among Dewey Decimal System categories, are virtually gone. That’s not how students now access information. The new media of choice are all digital, and that includes in the audiovisual realm. There streaming video has come rapidly to dominate.
How Do People Dance? Choreometrics on Film.
posted August 2, 2017
How do people dance, and how do cultural factors affect how they do? The Association for Cultural Equity in New York, which musicologist Alan Lomax founded to explore and preserve expressive traditions such as music and dance, will help to answer such questions by using a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation to restore and care for a set of “choreometric” films that Lomax and two colleagues made.
Pioneering Healthcare Recruitment Film Preserved
posted June 29, 2017
The Washington University Libraries’ Film & Media Archive will preserve Code Blue, a 1972 recruitment film aimed at bringing minorities into the medical profession, thanks to a grant in this year’s round of Basic Preservation Grants from the National Film Preservation Foundation. The Archive was among 36 institutions selected for one of the grants, earlier this month.
Life in a Wisconsin Convent in 1958
posted June 19, 2017
With a 2017 grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation, the Congregation of Sisters of St. Agnes, in Wisconsin, will preserve a promotional film from the heyday of recruitment of nuns to Catholic convents. In the 1950s and 1960s, young women entered Catholic convents in cohorts large enough that their process of formation could be as richly social as it was spiritual.
Washington University Preserves Rare Civil Rights Documentary
posted June 15, 2017
The Washington University Libraries’ Film & Media Archive has completed the preservation and digitization of The Streets of Greenwood, a rare civil-rights documentary film from 1963, and has made it freely available, online. The Archive completed the work with a Basic Preservation Grant it received in last year’s round of funding from the National Film Preservation Foundation. One purpose of the grants is to allow archives to make noteworthy films publicly available.
National Film Preservation Foundation Awards 36 Preservation Grants
posted June 13, 2017
The National Film Preservation Foundation has announced (13 June 2017) grants to save 57 films, including Code Blue (1972), a recruitment film aimed at bringing minorities into the medical field made by Henry Hampton’s Blackside Inc., the Emmy-winning producer of Eyes on the Prize, and Broken Barriers (1919), the first motion-picture adaptation of the Sholem Aleichem story that inspired Fiddler on the Roof.
Smile, You’re on a Police Body-Worn Camera
posted May 19, 2017
The advent of mass, filmed surveillance of public spaces might look like an unalloyed great idea to fans of police “reality” television shows. But it’s problematic in various ways. Among key challenges is to design and manage large, expensive, and vast archives of video footage — including, now, more and more of it from the body-worn cameras that police forces are adopting.
Online Field Guide to Sponsored Films launches
posted May 10, 2017
Few film fans would think to seek out films that corporations, schools, and religious and political organizations made to pitch their various causes and campaigns. And yet, as film collector and historian Rick Prelinger demonstrated in 2006 with his The Field Guide to Sponsored Films, such works can be of considerable historical, cultural, or artistic interest. Now an online companion to the Guide has been launched, the Online Field Guide to Sponsored Films.
Fixing Transcripts with the Crowd
posted April 24, 2017
A crowdsourcing project promises to demonstrate that when it comes to providing access to audiovisual archives, not only users with visual or hearing disabilities benefit. All users may.
The Curious Case of the Disappearing Video Archive
posted April 6, 2017
Nothing brings civic attitudes into sharper relief than a civil-rights test case. It doesn’t have to be about race — a case about the rights of people with disabilities serves just as well. Take the curious matter of the “disappearing” University of California at Berkeley videos.