Indiana University’s Digital Library Program, working with the Film and Television Documentation Center at the State University of New York at Albany, received a $239,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to digitize a film literature index and publish it on the Web.

More than 500 libraries, including 150 outside the United States, subscribe to the paper-based Film Literature Index, published by the State University of New York since 1973. The authoritative work indexes hundreds of international trade, popular and scholarly periodicals pertaining to film and television. "Our project will provide index information, but not full-text content, in a highly searchable electronic form of some 564,000 article entries,” explains Kristine Brancolini, director of the IU Digital Library Program and co-director of the project. “The online index will be a lasting, invaluable reference tool for scholars, students, movie buffs and the general public." The online version will offer several improvements over its paper-based counterpart, by allowing Boolean searching, for example, and allowing the user to limit searches by language or date. A prototype of the online index demonstrates the potential to increase the usefulness of this valuable information source.

The two collaborating institutions are well suited to complete this project successfully. The Film and Television Documentation Center at SUNY Albany has gained considerable experience and prestige by publishing the consistently high-quality index since the early 1970s, when it received seed funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to begin publication.

The Indiana University Digital Library Program has mounted important text, image, and audio collections on the World Wide Web and is currently publishing another index electronically. Funded by the U.S. Department of Education, the IU Digital Library Program will digitize and offer on the World Wide Web a twenty-year portion of Letopis’ Zhurnal’nykh Statei, a serial publication that indexes Russian periodicals from 1926 to the present.

John Walsh, manager of electronic text technologies at Indiana University, is co-director of the project.

The IU Digital Library program is a university-wide collaboration of the IU Libraries, The Office of the Vice President for Information Technology, the School of Library and Information Science, and the School of Informatics.

For more information:
Proposal submitted to the National Endowment for the Humanities
Indiana University Digital Library Program
State University of New York Film and Documentation Center