Archive for 2017

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.

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An Award for the Center for Home Movies

posted July 28, 2017

The Center for Home Movies has received a Society of American Archivists 2017 annual award for increasing public awareness of films that many individuals make, but until recently few institutions made a project of collecting. The award recognizes archiving of "compilation, transcription, exhibition, or public presentation of archives or manuscript materials for educational, instructional, or other public purpose.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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