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Film buffs and scholars have a new cache at their fingertips. The Media History Digital Library has made hundreds of thousands of pages of film and broadcasting history available in a searchable digital archive they’ve called Lantern, an open access, interactive library.

With help from the University of Wisconsin, Madison Department of Communication Arts, MHDL made their entire collection of Business Screen, The Hollywood Reporter, Photoplay and Variety—among other magazines—available for text searches for the first time.

In 2011 a group of film scholars developed MHDL, an updated resource for historians used to reading through microfilm archives of cinema and broadcast journals. At the time, their archive was a goldmine, pulling together the bounty of printed material chronicling the film industry. Now they’ve made it better, with more refined search, filtering and sorting tools. Plus you can download images and texts.

It may have been a rite of passage for film students to sequester themselves in a dark library carrel and scroll through microfiche reels of Moving Picture World, an influential trade journal until 1927, but Lantern brings venerable movie magazines dating up to the early ’70s into the light of day where anyone can access the images and articles of major trade and fan magazines, free of charge.

An early on-set chat rag, Film Fun, a magazine about “the happy side of the movies,” brought readers “intimate gossip of the profession told by the actors and actresses ‘between the reels.’” The images are gorgeous.

In the twenties a new amateur movie making industry thrived, with equipment and even tour packages available for buffs who wanted to tour exotic locales like Cuba with cameras and learn to shoot and preserve 16 mm motion pictures. A boom in DIY film magazines like Amateur Movie Makers targeted the early adopters.

And lest we think that pulp celebrity mags like People and Us are lower brow than those of yesteryear, we should think again. I’m not sure about you, but I’m not sure four-times-married Bette Davis makes the best love advice columnist. But apparently Photoplay magazine did.

Related Content:

Three Great Films Starring Charlie Chaplin, the True Icon of Silent Comedy

Unz.org: A New, Vast and Slightly Right-Wing Archive of Magazines, Books and TV Shows

How Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive Will Preserve the Infinite Information on the Web

Kate Rix writes about education and digital media. Visit her website and follow her on Twitter.

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Washington, D.C. is a tourism mecca, from its free museums to its vast collection of monuments and memorials. Here are the places tourists and locals alike should visit. [ more › ]

So, it’s date night and you don’t know what to do with your main squeeze. Why not take him or her or them to the moon via a web browser?

Using public domain media from NASA, some enterprising folks have constructed an cool site about the Apollo 11 lunar landing, allowing you to experience the event from a unique POV perspective.

Original audio feeds, which you’ll hear play back in real time, have also been converted to text feeds. You’ll also get choppy but real-time video of the landing, and you’ll even get all the Star Trek: The Original Series-era bleeps and bloops. You can pause the whole show with a single click.

It’s great stuff for space enthusiasts. Check it out:

(Side note: Having this audio feed playing in the background at work will make you look, like, way more important to your colleagues. “Radar, flight looks good. Okay, we got data back!”)

Image credit: NASA

Filed under: Science

Sept. 1937. "Barber shop and pool hall. Berwyn, Maryland." Between rounds, you can get a haircut. Medium-format negative by John Vachon. View full size.

acehotel:

Prehistoric Googling.

The following numbered AC Memo (AC 17.2013) was issued this morning

I am writing to inform you that as a consequence of the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) Memorandum M-13-05, Agency Responsibilities for Implementation of Potential Joint Committee Sequestration, and the National Archives and Records Administration’s (NARA) implementing guidance of this directive, we have decided to cancel this year’s RACO conference and annual Archivist Achievement Awards for Records Management.

As I am sure you are all aware, sequestration requires each Federal agency to make difficult choices. To comply with the OMB memo, NARA has applied increased scrutiny to all spending related to its conferences. As a result, after much analysis and discussion, we have determined that we should not proceed with RACO 2013.

We will continue to share critical government-wide records management information through the Federal Records Council and the Bi-monthly Records and Information Discussion Group (BRIDG) meetings, as well as our Records Express blog.

If you have any questions about this announcement, please feel free to contact me or Laurence Brewer, Director, National Records Management Program, at (301) 837-1539 or by email to Laurence.Brewer@nara.gov.

PAUL M. WESTER, JR.
Chief Records Officer
for the U.S. Government