Video of the Day: Archive of American Television

posted March 28, 2013

In 1955, in the first on-screen appearance of his memorable career in television comedy, Andy Griffith appeared in a U.S. Steel Hour episode entitled “No Time for Sergeants,” a television version of his first stage success on Broadway, later the same year. Born Andy Samuel Griffith in Mount Airy, North Carolina, in 1926, the fine

Video of the Day: Sing and Sling

posted February 15, 2013

"The Arizona Kid" is one of scores of films freely available for viewing on the site Classic Cinema Online.

New Books, and Lots of Them

posted November 26, 2012

You'll find descriptions of plenty of new and recent books relating to moving-image archiving on our books pages. You can also read about how authors went about the archival tasks needed to complete some of them.

Explaining the Digital Dilemma

posted September 20, 2012

Reducing to digital form everything written and published, and even said and thought, is surely going to produce as many cloud-stored ones and zeroes as there are grains of sand (ballpark estimate, only). For the rest of us, an essential aid in the monumental change in human affairs represented by gazillion-byte digitization will be generous

Indiana University Posts 197 Educational Films

posted July 16, 2012

From a woodchuck in doll clothes to a defense of the Korean War, 197 newly digitized films from the Indiana University Libraries’ educational film collection capture numerous aspects of American life from the 1940s through the 1980s. The Indiana University Libraries Film Archive has digitized 197 educational films produced by the university, and made them

Hauling Out Chariots of Fire for the Olympics

posted July 2, 2012

Seek and ye shall find. Wasn’t it an archivist, who said that? The admonition applied last week at the BFI National Archive. Officials there announced that a routine search for footage had uncovered an all-but-forgotten film Running – A Sport That Creates Both Bodily and Mental Health (1924), which features two of Britain’s most famous

J-Film Goes Global

posted June 18, 2012

Anime, J-horror, and Japanese personal documentary and “ethnic cinema” have gone global, and that’s in good part due to the advent of digital technology. So writes Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano in Japanese Cinema in the Digital Age, just out from the University of Hawai’i Press. The associate professor of film studies at Carleton University in Ottawa explores

Wonderful Alices, Throughout the Land

posted April 17, 2012

Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland has been memorably adapted numerous times, as early as 1903 by Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow (left). Throughout April, The Cinefamily, a hearth-warming, Los Angeles familiarizer of film, is presenting versions of the not-just-for-children classic. The selections are excerpted on the organization’s website. Included in the series are: Black Moon,

In the News

posted March 30, 2012

With the volume of news about moving image archives, film and video restoration, and the like that appears, here and there, you might conclude that the zeitgeist is turning in favor of such undertakings. Perhaps it is. Perhaps little by little awareness is growing of just what could be lost, if efforts are not made.