UCLA widens film archive access

alt="For UCLA students, employees and Alumni Association
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Tuesday, January 19, 1999

UCLA widens film archive access

FILM: School uses vast resources to produce educational
CD-ROMS

By A.J. Harwin

Daily Bruin Contributor

Owning the rights of 27 million feet of original programming,
the UCLA Film and Television Archive is exploring new ways to use
the archive’s vast collection of newsreels and KTLA’s news
collection for various multimedia purposes.

Currently the Film and Television Archive is using its resources
by helping to produce CD-ROMs that would allow more structured and
easier access to its reserves.

"The archive has different missions: film preservation,
television preservation, exhibitions and educational programs,"
said Steven Ricci, head of research and study at the Film and
Television Archive.

"This is essentially providing access to the collection. We’re
the largest university-based archive of moving images in the world.
So the job of trying to provide access to such a huge collection
for research purposes is a huge job.

"What we’ve tried to do is increase the amount of access to the
collection, show more and more films to different kinds of
researchers, and also change the nature of that path. Make it a
more satisfying multidimensional experience. Not just looking at
one videotape in relation to one topic."

In the last decade, viewing appointments have increased from
about 400 individual appointments a year to about 14,000. While
those at the archive are very happy about the increase, they felt
that there could be a more enriching experience in the way that
someone views film.

"This is still an individual sitting down at a workbench looking
at a piece of tape or film," Ricci said. "It occurred to us that
one of the interesting promises of new technologies is that it
would change the way people look at moving image material.

"They would understand it better, or see its value in an
important and different context other than something you would
watch on television or go to the movies to see. We also thought
that the new technology might have folks pay attention to moving
image materials that they normally wouldn’t look at."

To start the process of getting film onto CD-ROM, the archive
collaborated with Mitsui corporation to finance the production of
CD-ROMs. The archive identified a number of possible promising
topics that had not previously been covered.

That led to the production of the first CD-ROM, "Executive Order
9066: The Incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II"
in a partnership with the Japanese-American National Museum. The
idea for the CD-ROM came after seeing an exhibit at the museum.

"It was just an extraordinary, dramatic, eye-opening
instructional exhibit in the museum about this very important
component of our contemporary history which was often not spoken
about in textbooks," Ricci said.

"It occurred to us after we saw the exhibit that if we could
find a way to make the exhibit have a life after its physical show
at the museum in downtown Los Angeles, this would be a good
thing."

Those working on the CD-ROM project at the archive were not only
the authors of the "Executive Order 9066" CD-ROM, but also produced
it. They used photographs provided by the Japanese American
National Museum and newsreels from the Hearst-Metrotone newsreel
collection, which is part of the film archive collection.

"It seemed perfect because no one was looking at that material,
but it was on a very important topic," Ricci said. "We had the
material. And if we matched it with another institution out there,
we could make a very rich application. Which, if it were
successful, would mean that more and more people would learn about
an important part of our country’s past."

"Executive Order 9066" uses different sources of information,
such as extracts from books, still photographs, and video and audio
clips to explore issues and events from before the war to the
forced removal and the lives of Japanese Americans in the prison
camps.

In order to keep CD-ROM costs down, the archive uses many
resources that it already has copyrighted access to through the
university, such as the Los Angeles Times photo archives.

"We try to do things that we can do cheaply," said Sally
Hubbard, project coordinator of Archive New Media. "We try to use
in-house, in-university resources."

These resources included James Elroy, the author of "L.A.
Confidential," who narrated the archive’s second CD-ROM, "Tour
Historic L.A." This CD-ROM uses newsreels in the archive’s
collections along with the photographs in the collection of the
university’s libraries, providing a multi-media tour of about 25
different places in Los Angeles.

According to Ricci, "Tour Historic" provides the beginnings of
alternative histories for different Los Angeles areas, showing what
is behind the screen in the back room in places in Los Angeles.
"Tour Historic" also gives access to relevant web links.

Currently, the Film and Television Archive is not planning any
new CD-ROMs. The next order of business is to determine the best
platform to present its large video reserves – CD-ROM or Digital
Video Disk (DVD). The main concern according to Ricci is whether
DVD – which allows more content, and higher quality and performance
– will be able to penetrate the same market as the CD-ROM.

Grolier Educational

"Executive Order 9066" is the first of three educational CD-ROMs
offered by Grolier, an educational software company.