Hollywood History Goes Online

LOS ANGELES -- Aviator Charles Lindbergh's solo trip across the Atlantic and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's first flight into space will soon appear online, thanks to a project between IBM and the Film and Television Archive at the University of California at Los Angeles.

The preservation project's goal is to categorize, organize, and digitize more than 27 million feet of newsreel footage from the Hearst Metrotone News Collection. The archive's original newsreels--which disintegrate with age--will be preserved in an online repository, which can be accessed by the general public, historians, and scholars.

The project, and another collaboration between IBM and the Film Foundation involving movie education online, were announced at the start of the Digital Studio Summit. This two-day conference on the impact of digital technology on filmmaking and television production is taking place here this week.

Digitizing History

"Our work with IBM will make the moving-image history of the 20th century available and accessible to the public," says James Friedman, project leader for the UCLA Film and Television Archive.

The collection consists of newsreels for public viewing, unreleased stories, and outtakes shot from 1917 to 1971. The material spans global conflicts, technological and transportation advancements, medical breakthroughs, historic sporting events, and economic and political transformations such as the Great Depression and the New Deal.

IBM will provide research expertise plus its Web and database software and communications applications for use in the project, which will also utilize IBM's pSeries eServers.

"From protecting the treasure that is America's 20th-century visual archive to creating new systems to digitally distribute authorized versions of that content in the 21st century, IBM is there," says Steve Canepa, IBM vice president for the media and entertainment industry. The company is "using the latest advances in technology to digitize and preserve historical content and provide the foundation to build exciting new experiences for students and movie-watchers of all ages."

Film Education

IBM's other collaboration with the Film Foundation is intended to further the study of movies using the Internet.

IBM is helping the foundation, chaired by award-winning director Martin Scorsese, to extend its middle-school curriculum online. The project will provide educators with Web-based lesson plans, discussion groups, and collaboration and communications tools for teaching the "Story of Movies" course.

"Movies are a door to knowledge--about society, about prejudice, about history, about art--and teachers are eager for someone to help them make the link between education and film," said Margaret Bodde, The Film Foundation's co-executive director.