Cataloging Home Movies
Liz Coffey, Harvard Film Archive Film Conservator, valued AMIA colleague, Selznick School graduate, NHF alumna and 2007 summer film symposium presenter, asks a timely question this week, “I realize this is a question I should know the answer to, but has anyone come up with a publication or online guide to cataloging home movies?” We’re here with the Branch and Gilbert amateur film–the Branch material certainly being home movies, shot at home in Shanghai.
The Cataloging Road We’re Traveling
Northeast Historic Film maintains a 28,000 record item-level database in ProCite, the primary advantages of which are that as we were getting NHF off the ground the software was available, affordable and and PC friendly. It was flexible in terms of field length and output forms, and it did full text searching across all fields.
We also created a collection-level database for our 1995 Collections Guide: Moving Image Collections of Northeast Historic Film, a publication made possible by a grant from The Betterment Fund. The current, interim, online edition: Northeast Historic Film Collections Guide.
We Have Explored These Resources
- Archival Moving Image Materials: a Cataloging Manual. 2000. 2nd ed. Washington, D.C.: Cataloging Distribution Service, Library of Congress. (We began with the first edition, a friendly lavendar softcover book.)
- On beyond zebra, detailed guidance in this online resource, UCLA Film & Television Archive Cataloging Procedure Manual–Voyager
- This year Andrea Leigh, UCLA FIlm and Television Archive Metadata Librarian, helped us think about PBCore, which is just launching its cataloging utility in FileMaker 9. Her NHF metadata dictionary, here in an Excel spreadsheet, includes two sample NHF records, one for From Stump to Ship, genres selected, “Amateur films” and “Short films,” and for The Movie Queen, Lincoln, “Short films.” NHF Metadata Dictionary (PBCore)
- MIC, the AMIA and Library of Congress Moving Image Collections initiative, has cataloging resources online and according to MIC manager Jane Otto, the MIC cataloging utility will be available in January 2008. [As of April 2008 release scheduled for sometime this summer] We have uploaded 25,000 skeletal records to MIC. Our next steps are to expand the number of fields included and to link to digital objects including the Branch and Gilbert digitized video. Gilbert records in MIC
AMIA Discussion on Cataloging Home Movies June 2007
Albert Steg, new chair for the AMIA Small Gauge Interest Group, inquired about practices in cataloging home movies. In the exchange, Andrea Leigh suggests referring to the Thesaurus for Graphic Materials (TGM).
TGM was designed for indexing still images, but there is applicability to home movies in its cope pertaining to ofness (genre/form) and aboutness (subject), e.g. “Some pictorial materials are important as much for their artifactual value as for their subject content. The distinction between topical terms and genre or physical characteristic terms is critical in describing such materials, since researchers often know with great certainty whether they wish to see examples of formats and physical types or images in which formats or physical types constitute the subject.” TGM provides a controlled vocabulary for describing a broad range of subjects depicted in such materials, including activities, objects, types of people, events, and places and is available online.
Item Level and Collection Level
Online Collections Guide records:
Branch Collection
Some notes helping us work through tools (PDF) Item Level and Collections Level notes by Andrea Leigh
Item Level notes:
Northeast Historic Film is located at the 1916 Alamo Theatre in Bucksport, Maine. Karan Sheldon, NHF co-founder, is project director for Finding and Using Moving Images in Context.