"A goldmine for research" is the way film historian Leonard Maltin described it on his website, Movie Crazy. "Exciting news . . . I'm thrilled and am hopeful" was the response from experienced researcher and Valentino scholar Donna Hill. University of Arizona grad student Amanda Howard heard about it from a professor, "Wow, I've already found things I've never seen before."

What's the buzz all about?

Just the other day, David Pierce put out the word on Nitrateville about a new project  - called the Media History Digital Library - to digitize old trade and fan magazines and put them online. On Nitrateville, Pierce wrote:
I've been working on a project to digitize trade and fan magazines, and the first batch, from the collection of the Pacific Film Archive, is now on-line.
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=%22media%20history%20digital%20library%22

There are eight volumes (four years) of Photoplay, and one volume each of Motion Picture Classic (1920) and Moving Picture World (April-June 1913). Thanks to Nancy Goldman of the Pacific Film Archive for working with me on this group of materials.

As always with the Internet Archive, you can download high-quality PDFs, embed their viewer on your webpage, and download the original full-quality scans. 

I have grant funding to do much more (it costs about 10c per page) and am working with several other libraries and archives to coordinate scanning of material from their collections. . . . . I hope to do another batch of materials in the next few months.
This is indeed exciting news - and a future boon to film researchers. The brochure for the Media History Digital Library, which outlines this ambitious project, can be found at http://www.mediahistoryproject.org/

The scanned texts found in the Media History Digital Library also offer something even the best library, with bound copies or microfilm of these publicaions, could never provide - the ability to do keyword searches! Here is a sample, just one of the handful of works already on-line.



If you’d like to contribute to the project, or if you have bound volumes of trade journals or periodicals you’d be willing to loan, contact David Pierce at prizma2@gmail.com.