Georgia Tech's CEISMC Gazette - February 2005

Saving a legacy of film
by Andrew Kerr
February 2005

Georgia Tech's Interactive Media and Technology Center (IMTC) is embarking on a quest to save our motion picture heritage. They are in the process of creating an enormous database of films that reside in libraries and archives around the country. According to IMTC Director Ed Price, the awareness of the very existence of these films may be a giant step in the fight to preserve them.

CEISMC Gazette - How many films have been cataloged so far, and how many are expected to be cataloged ultimately?

Ed Price - So far, maybe around 250,000. We plan to have millions by the end of 2005.

CG - Who is actually entering all this data? The archives holding the films? It seems it would be a monumental undertaking!

EP - The archives that have catalog data in the system now already had some sort of electronic records of their collections or at least part of their collections. Part of MIC is a mapping utility that we use to map data from their database system into MIC's internal system. Then we can import it and search it, or re-export is as MARC, MPEG-7, Dublin Core, and other database schemas in the future.

CG - Basically, this is a giant, searchable database, right?

EP - So, it's a giant searchable database. There are actually two separate databases linked together. One contains information about an archive, the kind of stuff they collect, how they preserve film and video, etc. The second contains the catalog records of all of their films (if they choose to give us those, you can be in the first database only). The two databases are dynamically linked so as you search for records you can easily call up information about the archive that holds the film or video.

We have done extensive usability testing on the site, both with science teachers as well as film professionals, and these tests have led to a lot of changes to the site and how you search for things.

CG - Were you approached with the idea to do this project, or did you come up with it yourselves?

EP - The idea started at the National Film Preservation Board several years ago. They commissioned a study, and the study's author was Grace Agnew, who at the time was here at Georgia Tech (she is now at Rutgers). She and I have done several projects together. After the study was complete, the Library of Congress and the Association of Moving Image Archivists wanted to move forward with the project, so Grace and I started to look for sources of funding.

We currently have a proposal being reviewed at NSF for a second phase of the project. One of the goals of this is to build an easy to use, open source cataloging system for smaller film and video archives that do not have a catalog of their collections, and probably don't have the money or IT staff to install a traditional cataloging system.

CG - A lot of data is available already on your site already. Have film preservationists or cinephiles begun using it, yet? If yes, what has the reaction been?

EP - We know a lot of film preservationists are using it already, and we have gotten good feedback from some of them. We have not done much to publicize the site outside of the film preservation community yet, so I doubt many cinephiles are using it yet, but we expect that to change. We are trying to get more data loaded before we start telling the general public (and especially more digital content, which is what teachers will want most). National Geographic TV is giving us rights to use quite a bit of digital materials, so once we get their content loaded we will probably start trying to reach out to science teachers more.

You can visit the moving pictures website for yourself at http://mic.imtc.gatech.edu.

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