Research Horizons Magazine
November 22, 2004

Motion Picture History: Moving Image Collections Project Offers Access to Archived Video and Film

When silent-film legend Rudolf Valentino's 1922 picture “Beyond the Rocks” resurfaced this past spring after nearly 75 years on the missing films list, an important gap in motion picture history was filled.

Motion pictures made before 1950 were printed on a cellulose nitrate base that deteriorates after exposure to air. A byproduct of the Moving Image project is that the discovery of "lost" films could spur preservation efforts and prevent the irrevocable loss of motion pictures. Photo: Blaine Bartell

Part of Ed Price's job is to make sure such classics are not lost again.

Director of the Interactive Media Technology Center at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Price heads development of an integrated, searchable online catalog of moving images held by libraries, museums, archives, television broadcasters and the motion picture industry.

Conducted under a grant from the National Science Foundation, the Moving Image Collections project at mic.imtc.gatech.edu includes development of a search engine, dynamic Web portal technology and the user interface.

“The Library of Congress is supporting the project, but the final product is meant to search other holdings too,” Price says. “We're going to tie many repositories together and make their holdings accessible with a one-stop search engine.”

The Moving Image Collections project is developing an online catalog of moving images held by libraries, museums, archives, television broadcasters and the motion picture industry. Photo: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

The search function will work much like Google™ and other keyword-searchable programs. The difference -- and Price's challenge -- is tagging the images with enough information to make searches as thorough and efficient as possible.

“Google is a really great tool, but it usually doesn't drill down into library catalogs,” Price notes. “We're building a Google-like tool that searches every archive's library of video and film.

“One of our biggest problems is that different places catalog things in different ways, so searching across multiple catalogs is difficult,” he adds. “We ingest each archive’s own labeling criteria, and then we map that to our own internal criteria.”

Incorporating all the reference and identification data “allows users to search in a more lucid way,” Price explains.

Because moving images exist in various formats, searchers will be directed to the Web sites of the institutions holding the material. At those sites, users may view the images as streaming video if they have been digitized, or order copies of material that exists only in analog form.

Atlanta's Fox Theater prospered as one of the city's finest movie houses from the 1930s through the 1960s. Photo: Georgia Department of Economic Development

The project's rollout is set for this fall with a cataloged database representing 50,000 moving images linked to a dozen organizations’ Web sites, including the Smithsonian, National Geographic and the National Library of Medicine.

Once the system is operating, expanding its scope will be relatively easy, Price notes. He expects the project to eventually catalog several million images from more than 1,000 institutions.

“We'll keep doing additional work to make it (the archive) better, faster and more complete,” Price says.

One of the many interesting aspects of the project involves working with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to locate lost motion pictures, primarily from the 1920s and ‘30s, Price notes.

“Once they know a certain film exists, they want to preserve it,” he explains. “If we can catalog it all now, even if it's something on film, it might stand a chance of lasting a while. If it's not cataloged, and nobody knows it's there, it will just deteriorate and be gone forever.”

RESEARCH NEWS & PUBLICATIONS OFFICE
Georgia Institute of Technology
75 Fifth Street, N.W., Suite 100
Atlanta, Georgia 30308 USA

MEDIA RELATIONS CONTACTS: John Toon (404-894-6986); E-mail: (john.toon@edi.gatech.edu); Fax (404-894-4545) or Jane Sanders (404-894-2214); Email: (jane.sanders@edi.gatech.edu).

TECHNICAL CONTACT: Ed Price (404-894-3547); (ed.price@imtc.gatech.edu).

WRITER: Gary Goettling