History is becoming big business, and nowhere more so than in film and video. It’s not just the History Channel, and other obvious documentary channels that are plumbing the film and tv archives of the world. All specialty channels, and a good number of feature films, are using past programming in a dizzying variety of ways.

The appetite for archival moving image footage is literally inexhaustible. It’s invariably cheaper than shooting new footage, and provides context and perspective that is difficult to recreate. And frequently, archival footage is unique, and therefore fresher.

More programming formats are being invented using archival footage, be it in music videos, tv commercials, trivia games or irreverent comic takes on the past. Some bold media enthusiasts predict that we might one day see as wide a variety of specialty and mass-media channels as is currently available in newspapers and magazines.

And then there are the exploding variety of moving image reference products offered. The laser discs that have been around for almost 15 years are being superseded by another generation of ‘video-disc’ formats. We’ve seen primitive and very brief examples of moving images being delivered via computers; and many expect that this will be another growth opp for archival footage.

The ‘Yellow Pages’ of film research

Many, therefore, want to enter this world and now there is a comprehensive, thus necessarily bulky and cumbersome, guide to this new/old world. Footage: The Worldwide Moving Image Sourcebook, published fall 1997 by Second Line Search, was considered an indispensable guide even before it was published. With its 1,300 pages, 3,000 sources (including almost 1,000 international sources), and listings for 700 professionals and companies providing moving image expertise, facilities and services, no other moving image research tool pretends to be as truly encyclopedic as is Footage.

Now in commenting on this publication, I have to offer a disclaimer. I am in the book, offering my services as a consulting archivist with particular expertise in the history of Canadian broadcasting, the film and tv production of Atlantic Canada, and archives management. But so is everyone else, with no one left to critique their efforts. This degree of comprehensiveness is surely a measure of the strength of this project.

One can confidently claim that Footage had this solid a reputation because it was a sequel to the Footage 89 & 91 guides to North American film and video sources that anyone doing film research in the past decade has become familiar with.

Filmmaker Ron Mann calls these guides the ‘Yellow Pages’ of film research, and acknowledges that his documentaries, relying so heavily on archives, would simply have been impossible without these guides.

The formidable, and unimaginable to many, task of compiling such guides was conceived and carried out by Rick Prelinger, an unassuming, but most enterprising, privately based, moving image archivist. Prelinger has himself salvaged a collection of 40,000 ephemeral (that is educational, advertising, educational and industrial titles) films known as the Prelinger Film Archives and is currently off doing a feature film based exclusively on archival footage.

200-page subject index

The challenge of keeping up with the exploding world of moving image collections around the world has been inherited by Second Line Search, a New York City company that concentrates on providing film research services.

Their strategy was to temporarily engage a variety of film researchers who invited, cajoled and helped the institutions to respond to a six-page questionnaire. Editors compiled the responses, and developed a 200-page subject index with over 10,000 entries. It took some 15 months with a staff growing from two to 15 spending $50,000 on phone calls and faxes alone.

The results are impressive but necessarily dependent on the institutions responding. The editors are fully aware that their entries from Asia and Africa are still weak, but they expect that more collections from these countries will want to be included as they use the source-book themselves. Canada is well represented with over 150 institutions responding.

A more fundamental limitation for Footage as the comprehensive source it seeks to be, is the depth of information provided by contributing institutions. They encouraged all respondents to provide as much detail as possible about their holdings and when they received too much info they edited it down proportionately. However, it was impossible to inflate entries.

Substantial moving image collections at the National Archives and Records Service in Washington or the Library of Congress are described at considerable length (13 pages and nine pages, respectively), and the index stands a reasonable chance of appropriately directing the researcher.

Many respondents, however, offer only a brief paragraph describing their holdings, and when that description is general the index cannot be very useful. Thus, the Footage index naturally favors the smaller more focused collections, where a small paragraph actually does them justice; whereas the larger, more widely based collections, would need to take as much time as did nara or loc in compiling their entry.

Net links, CD-ROM in offing

An obvious question is why publish in hard copy, particularly for a world that is changing daily and is technologically sophisticated. The reply of Footage staffers is that market research said their public wanted something that actually sat on their desks.

Still one expects that they will be looking to also publish on cd-rom because it should then be cheaper (Footage sells for us$195 plus shipping and handling) and searching should be faster. Also, this kind of research tool is perfectly made for publication on the World Wide Web (I am told that this is in process) with direct links to the catalogues that a growing number of collections have available on the Internet.

Indeed, the beginning of such a catalogue of catalogues for moving image archives exists as ‘Footage.net’ on the Web at //www.footage.net. The dozen databases that this omnibus site allows one to search is a mind-boggling research tool and somehow works with remarkable speed.

Even relatively obscure locations and subjects yield hits, and general subjects such as ‘Canadian beer’ offered up more hits than anyone could follow up. Moreover, many of these databases allow you to easily order footage through an e-mail link.

Also, Footage.net offers a zap request service where you can pose your query as to what footage you are seeking and the dozens/hundreds? of readers of this electronic bulletin board may respond as their time and energy allows.

Digital footage delivery network

Most recently, Footage.net announced the ‘prelaunch’ of its digital footage delivery network promising same-day delivery of footage, often costing less than the cost of shipping footage.

Pretty impressive, but a caution is in order. The dozen or so databases with their million shots are merely a beginning. Even the companies represented may not have their total holdings indexed and available on these searchable databases. Experienced moving image researchers appreciate and make frequent use of Footage.net but know that they regularly have to visit particular Websites or make more directed queries of the hundreds of collections not online. Therefore, they are also going to be acquiring Footage to help them figure out where to direct their queries, particularly for the more thorough searches beyond the shot needed for tonight’s newscast.

Another caution to keep in mind is in respect to the claims so many of the moving image archive collections are making for themselves, particularly in light of collections being bought and sold, and changing representation weekly.

The WPA Film Library, based in Orland Park, Illinois, considers itself ‘the world’s leading source for archival and stock footage.’ Energy Film Library has offices around the world and calls itself ‘the largest and most unique collection of original cinematography in the world.’ Obviously, all such claims warrant a dose of skepticism, but such claims may also divert one from the companies with slightly more modest, but more realistic, claims; not to mention the production agencies, and the specialized and regional moving image archives that have not begun to promote themselves. The great virtue of Footage is that it opens moving image research to this world.

Absence of rate cards

Notably absent from Footage, from Footage.net, and from the various other Websites of moving image-archive collections are the rate cards letting you know what such footage will actually cost you. This world is changing so fast and rates can vary so dramatically, depending on what uses you need to license, that no one wants to publish rates.

For each entry in Footage a frequent response under the heading ‘licensing’ is ‘apply for information,’ which usually means that the institution will figure out what to do with your request when they receive it. And rates are negotiable, particularly if you can offer some service, footage, credit line or reciprocal arrangement in return.

Moving image explosion

Those of us in the moving -image archive world are delighted, if also sometimes wary and definitely challenged, by the exploding business. We got together recently in Washington at the annual conference of the Association of Moving Image Archivists and surprised ourselves to find 500 are registered.

This association was only founded six years ago and has literally doubled its membership in the past three years. We are having fun seeing our beloved archival records receive attention, even if we do debate at some length what is appropriate for them.

The business of moving image archiving has not by any means peaked, history clearly has a future.

Ernest J. Dick, is a consulting archivist, based in Granville Ferry, n.s.