I have two definitions of what history is, which I wrote years ago and have repeated several times thereafter – and here they are again: 1. History is what was known once but has been forgotten 2. History is the present’s interpretation of the past It’s worth considering these when contemplating the subject of women’sRead More
Category: Databases
What are filmographies for?
What are filmographies for? That might seems to be an easy question to answer – a filmography is a list of films defined by a particular subject, much as a bibliography is a similarly defined list of books. But that says what a filmography is; it doesn’t say what it is for. It’s a questionRead More
Found online # 5 – cinema websites
The latest in this occasional series of themed lists of online resources is on a subject of particular interest to me. I’ve spent a good deal of my latter years as a researcher investigating cinemas, and was involved some while ago in producing a database of pre-1914 film venues and businesses in London, still availableRead More
Cinema contexts
Of all the ephemeral objects we build for ourselves in the digital world, among the most precious and at the greatest risk of disappearing are databases. Databases are organised and queryable collections of data. The larger ones, along with their cousin the content management system, govern our world and manage who we are, since theirRead More
Found online # 3 – Film databases
Next up in this occasional series on handy web resources is film databases. Everyone knows about the Internet Movie Database, which has reached such a state of majesty that it doesn’t just reflect the film industry, it helps drive it. But there are plenty of other film databases out there, some loyally documenting a nationalRead More
Theatre on the box
Judi Dench played Barbara in Major Barbara (1962) with Edward Woodward who played Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard (1971) with Jenny Agutter who played in Hedvig Ekdal in The Wild Duck (1971) with Denholm Elliott who played Alan Quine in Donkey’s Years (1980) with Penelope Keith who played Amanda Prynne in Private Lives (1976) withRead More
Lumière encore
Well, no sooner had I written that there was no website good or bad devoted to the films of the Lumière brothers, then someone quite coincidentally tells me of one – and it is superb. Catalogue Lumière is exactly what it says, a catalogue of the films made by the Lumières between 1895 and 1905.Read More
Searching the BFI
The British Film Institute has issued a new version of its database, which is a huge improvement on what has been available online before now. The new service, BFI Collections Search, for the first time combines its bibliographic, filmographic and technical databases, something the BFI has been trying to engineer for years (decades even). ThisRead More
It happened today
I’ve been thinking about news lately. At the British Library we’ve just piloted a television and radio news service, called Broadcast News, which has selected news broadcasts from May 2010 onwards taken from seventeen channels available on Freeview and Freesat. But the service can’t just stand alone. It has to join up with other newsRead More