This post is by Daniel Dancis, a Textual Records Archivist and blogger at The Text Message. When is a photograph more than just a photograph? Of the millions of digitized images in the National Archives Catalog it is always a thrill to find something new in an old picture. Even more, discovering a connection between two or … Continue reading Double Take II: Finding Posters within Photos
A couple of years back, the National Archives Motion Picture Preservation Lab started seeing an uptick in researcher reference requests for one specific series of films: 306-LSS, a group of more than 400 black and white reels of stock footage that ended up in the hands of the United States Information Agency (USIA). As the … Continue reading Searchable Stock Shots: 306-LSS Films Now Online!
Today's guest blog post is by Sharon Thompson, Executive Director of the Lesbian Home Movie Project (LMHP). A writer, editor, and film archivist, Thompson has used NARA records in her research into women filmmakers. We asked her to write about one of her research projects to close out Women's History Month. Between one question and … Continue reading Finding Elizabeth Wheeler: Rediscovering a 1940s Woman Filmmaker
When scanning films in the National Archives Motion Picture Lab, we sometimes come across images that we want to learn more about. We recently transferred several reels of unedited footage depicting African American college students in various classroom settings. The posters on the wall indicated that the footage had been shot during wartime. The slates … Continue reading Stock Footage Spotlight: Historically Black Colleges and Universities in WWII
America stands unique in the world: the only country not founded on race but on a way, an ideal. Not in spite of but because of our polyglot background, we have had all the strength in the world. That is the American way. –President Ronald ReaganDecember 1945, in honor of Kazuo Masuda andAugust 10, 1988, at … Continue reading Fractured Ideals: Japanese American Internment through a Government Lens
During World War II, films were a vital part of the war effort. Films trained, entertained, and informed our troops, and films distributed information to the American public who, before the advent of television, had a serious movie-going habit. Very early on, the Office of War Information (OWI) also established an overseas branch, which would … Continue reading Projections of America: Tuesday in November and the 1944 Election
This post was written by Criss Kovac and Harry Snodgrass. Criss is the supervisor of the National Archives Motion Picture Preservation Lab. Harry recently joined the Motion Picture Lab and is working on a project to preserve and digitize World War I and World War II films and photographs. When the U.S. Office of War … Continue reading Restoring The True Glory
My first couple of blogs focused on born-digital and scanned images created by Federal agencies and accessioned to the Still Picture unit, but I’m now shifting gears and highlighting some of our in-house digitization activities. The main series I’m going to talk about can trace its roots back to 1974 when we received the first … Continue reading Digitization Activities
