Film Digital Collections

The University of Maryland Digital Collection:

I was not able to access any of the video footage on this website. The site indicated that only people with a university directory account can access the footage from off site. I looked over the directions for constituents to access the videos from off site, and it looks like a complete pain. I can imagine this probably is a huge road block for a lot of users and lowers the number of people using these resources. Looking over the metadata was interesting though. It was simple and easy to understand and I liked that there was an identifier listed in case you wanted to cite the video. I also liked that they kept the initial information seen by the user simple so as not to overwhelm the average user with superfluous information. I didn't find a lot of information about the digitization process itself, just some general information on digitization overall. The search feature seemed to be pretty good, and turned up lots of relevant results on a few broad keywords that I tried.

The Internet Movie Archive Collection:

I loved this site! I liked that there are subject headings at the top of the page to direct you to your area of interest. I watched Merrie Melodies, a Tale of Two Kitties and the quality was actually pretty good. The picture looked good and what I was really impressed with was the sound. The history of the organization provided is good, and the FAQ's page was fairly thorough and included a whole section on how they digitize their films. I liked the options on the advanced search feature and I also like that it was streaming video.

The Library of Congress American Memory Motion Pictures:

I was suprised by how clunky this website was. Actually I take that back, I'm not suprised because I've looked at enough LC stuff that I've seen a pattern of subpar quality user interfaces, but I'm still amazed given the prestige of their orgranization. On the page we were directed to, there were only 16 collections. Getting to the point where you actually finally got to see the film footage took as may as 8 clicks in some cases and it was incredibly frustrating. The search feature was okay... I watched two videos from the burlesque (variety stage) collection. The 1st video of a female perfomer getting ready was terrible. Her head was 1/4 cut off the entire video and it was very shaky. The other video was pretty good however (a burlesque/trapeze artist disrobing). It was a clear picture, pretty steady and a good pace. With this difference in quality it's hard to say if the problem was the film itself or the person in charge of digitizing it. It would have been nice to just watch if from the website itself, but the MPEG 4 opened fairly easily in my windows media player.