Sixty years of 16mm film, 1923-1983: a symposium (1954)

Record Details:

Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

cataloging Lucile M. Morsch M9 EVELOPMENTS IN THE CATALOGING OF FILM have closely paralleled the development of film libraries and the use of films in public, school, and college libraries. The year 1923 is an appropriate one for the beginning of a survey of these developments because, although there were film programs with showings in public libraries at least ten years earlier, it was in this year that the literature reflects the first suggestion that libraries should concern themselves with the ownership of film collections. William F. Jacob, librarian of the General Electric Company, had recently outlined a plan at a meet- ing of the New York Library Association whereby "a group of libraries should unite in the ownership of a first-class picture machine and a systematized collection of educational films, the pictures to illustrate courses of study and reading, to be accompanied by collections of appropriate books." 1 A collection of film cannot be effectively "systematized" with- out being cataloged. Cataloging intended to be used for systematizing the contents of a film collection is the only kind under consideration in this chapter. Such cataloging will serve as a guide to the content as well as to the titles of the films in a collection. The first two decades of the period under review, from 1923 to 1943, saw the establishment of a number of the leading film collec- tions, including the Film Library of the Museum of Modern Art, the National Film Library, created as an extension of the British Film Institute, the Canadian National Film Board Library, and the National Archives, and the development of many smaller collections. Few gen- eral libraries had film collections during this period. Problems of cataloging films were considered to be more or less unique with the few film libraries, each working out its own system experimentally, until the libraries in schools and colleges were recognized as logical units for handling films. The methods of cataloging and classifying that had been developed for books were found to be applicable to films with only slight modifications. 2 During the forties, the greatly increased emphasis on audio- visual materials in general, and on films in particular, in libraries of almost every type resulted in wider attention to methods by which the