Media History Digital Library Launches Lantern

Thanks to the folks at the Media History Digital Library (MHDL), media historians have fulltext online access to classic media periodicals and books in the public domain. Lantern is their newly launched search platform for this impressive collection containing digital scans of over 800,000 pages (and growing), from 1904 to 1963. The project is made possible by owners of the materials who loan them for scanning and donations to support the cost of scanning.

Materials in the MDHL, available for free viewing and free download, include:

▽  Business Screen (1938-1973)

▽  The Film Daily (1918-1948)

▽  International Photographer (1929-1941)

▽  Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (1916-1949)

▽  Journal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (1950-1954)

▽  The Educational Screen (1922-1962)

▽  Motion Picture [Magazine] (1914-1941)

▽  Moving Picture World (1907-1919)

▽  Photoplay (1914-1940)

▽  Radio Age: Research, Manufacturing, Communications, Broadcasting, Television (1942-1957)

▽  Radio Broadcast (1922-1930)

▽  Sponsor (1946-1964)

▽  Talking Machine World (1906-1928)

▽  Variety (1905-1926)

You can keep up with DHDL by signing up to receive Blog posts alerts from the site.

Audiovisual Citation Guidelines

The British Universities Film & Video Council has just launched the most comprehensive set of guidelines for citing audiovisual materials to date. As authors of the guide point out, "existing guidelines for the referencing of moving image and sound are often insufficient as they are based on standards developed for the written word."

 
This 19-page guide, Audio-Visual Citation: BUFVC Guidelines for Referencing Moving Image and Sound, provides examples of how to cite feature films versus feature films on DVD or with DOI access online, extracts from features, extra feature documentary material from DVD titles, amateur films from private collections, film trailers accessed online, artist installation film, television accessed from DVDs or online or as part of online archive, advertisements accessed online.  You get the idea. Radio too. Music downloads, podcasts. Also new media examples of user-generated content, online-only programs and games.

“This guide now makes it possible for any writer (even a student) to lead their readers to the exact audiovisual source they are discussing"--John Ellis, Professor of Media Arts, Royal Holloway,  University of London 

Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive

Good news on the database front, Penn Libraries has just signed on to the Entertainment IndustryMagazine Archive. It sits in the Proquest suite of databases that you are already familiar with if you search key social science databases (Sociological Abstracts, IBSS, etc.), Digital Dissertations, or any of the historical newspapers such as the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, etc. so it will be easy to get find as well as combine with broader searching.

EIMA covers core US and UK trade magazines in film, music, broadcasting and theater. Magazines have been scanned cover-to-cover in high-resolution color, with granular indexing of all articles, covers, ads and reviews. I guess the biggest omission in this collection is Rolling Stone. That being said:

This database includes several trade magazines which have effectively provided the main historical record for their subject areas throughout the 20th century, such as Variety (1905-2000), Billboard (1894-2000), Broadcasting (1931-2000) and The Stage (1880-2000). Although these titles focus primarily on film, music, TV/radio and theatre respectively, they have between them covered the full range of popular entertainments throughout their history, from music halls, circuses and fairs to jukeboxes, gambling machines and computer games.

For students of popular music, the UK music press titles New Musical Express (1946-2000) and Melody Maker (1926-2000) are equally invaluable sources: from their origins as trade papers for working musicians, they grew into mass-circulation weeklies in the 1960s, and pioneered serious rock journalism in the late 1960s and 70s. A selection of more specialist magazines give in-depth coverage of musical genres and eras, such as 'British Invasion' pop (Rave, 1964-70), reggae, African and Caribbean music (The Beat, 1982-2000), or the rave scene (Mixmag, 1983-2000).

Bringing these titles together in a single database gives researchers the opportunity to find comprehensive information on specific films, plays, theaters, actors, directors, TV series, film studios, musicians, genres, record labels, subcultures and youth movements. The inclusion of consumer and fan magazines such as Picturegoer (1911-1960), American Film (1975-1992) and Musician (1976-1999) means that a single search can bring back industry news items, features on technological breakthroughs and in-depth interviews with major artists, together with photographs and illustrations, gossip columns, listings, reviews, charts and statistics. Items such as advertisements, covers and short reviews of films, music singles or other works have been treated as separate documents with accurately-captured titles in order to help researchers find all the relevant material for their search topic.  --Proquest description

Introducing Metamedia

Check out a new site, Metamedia, on the Annenberg Library homepage (in the section Visual/Multimedia).
 
Here you will find over 600 movies about communication as it is situated in some form of media--television, radio, the telephone, photographs, the internet, recorded music, etc. These are movies in which media (including codes of communication) are central or catalytic to the story and/or main characters in the story represent media practitioners, professional or amateur. Metamedia includes fictional films as well as documentaries. And it includes world cinema as well as Hollywood.

The site also includes a Discussion Board for readers to makes comments and suggestions. The site can be a sort of community project. The current list of films is by no means complete so I look forward to urgings for must-adds, why isn't _________ on the list???

Access to films featured in Metamedia varies. If the entry includes a link to VCat, that means it's available at Penn--usually Van Pelt or Annenberg though there are a few other movie collections on campus. The list also includes titles that we don't have at Penn, in which case there will be a link to IMBD or a website that sells (or at least has more information about) the title.

I think the site is fairly easy to tool around in. There are 51 topical areas if you are looking for specific themes or genres. You may be looking for only documentaries, or only movies about radio, or you want to get out of the United States (click on World). Here are the topics: Advertising * Art * Biography * Cartoons/Animation * Celebrity * Children/Youth * Communication disorders * Communication-General * Computers/New Media * Consumerism *Copyright/Intellectual property * Crime * Disaster/Risk communication * Documentary * Election campaigns * Environmental communication * Film/Filmmaking * Free Speech/Censorship * Gaming * Health communication * Information Interview * Journalism * Language * Mass media * Media-Amateur/Grassroots *Media ethics * Media violence * Minorities-Racial/Ethnic * Minorities-Sexual * Music/Recording industry * Newspapers * Non-Verbal communication / Photography * Political communication * Pornography * Privacy/Surveillance * Public relations/Persuasion * Public space  * Religion * Radio * Representation * Sports * Supernatural communication * Telephonic Communication * Television * War * World * Women/Gender * Writing/Publishing

July CommQuote

This month's CommQuote belongs to Kurt Vonnegut from Slaughter-House-Five. In this haunting scene Billy Pilgrim watches a movie in reverse; in his mind he's able to undo war by simply reversing the reel.

Billy Pilgrim padded downstairs on his blue and ivory feet. He went into the kitchen, where the moonlight called his attention to a half bottle of champagne on the kitchen table, all that was left from the reception in the tent. Somebody had stoppered it again. "Drink me," it seemed to say.
So Billy uncorked it with his thumbs. It didn't make a pop. The champagne was dead. So it goes.
Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove. He had an hour to kill before the saucer came. He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this :
American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.
The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.

--Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughter-House-Five, 1969
pages 93-94 in the Dial Press Trade paperback edition, 2005

Arbitron Cinema Advertising Study; Pew Reports

The Arbitron Cinema Advertising Study 2007 is the follow-up to Arbitron’s 2003 study which examined the size, characteristics, and behavior of movie theater audiences. In this new report, Arbitron focuses on the moviegoer’s relationship with cinema advertising and evaluate its ability to influence young and affluent consumers.

And from Pew:

Public Knowledge of Current Affairs Little Changed by News and Information Revolutions What Americans Know: 1989-2007, a report from the Pew Research Center for People and the Press.

A Quarter's Worth of News Coverage A new report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism which finds that the four-year-old war in Iraq dwarfed all other topics in the U.S. news media during the first three months of 2007. However, more than 80% of war news focused on Americans -- those shaping policy, fighting or affected at home. Only about one-in-six stories was primarily about Iraqis, whether their government, their lives, or their casualties. The 2008 presidential campaign ranked second in coverage with news focusing primarily on Democratic candidates.

Also from PEJ, don't forget about their annual State of the News Media reports. State of the News Media 2007 has been out since March and is the fourth edition of this reputable report on the health and status of American journalism. (Earlier reports have been highlighted in a previous post.)