Research

The Moving Image Source Research Guide is a gateway to the best online resources related to film, television, and digital media.

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  • 3-D Film Archive  
    Founded in 1990 by Bob Furmanek, the 3-D Film Archive is dedicated to saving and preserving the heritage of stereoscopic film. The organization has located and restored original dual-strip 35mm Polaroid prints of more than thirty features and two dozen shorts from 1922-1955.
  • AFI Silent Film Database  
    A comprehensive database of silent film synopses, with extensive cast and crew information. Titles can be sorted by keyword (everything from "Romance" to "Vamps" to "Amusement Parks").
  • American Masters Database  
    Read well-researched biographies of important film and television personalities.
  • American Widescreen Museum  
    The American Widescreen Museum is a collection of online exhibitions on a variety of film exhibition and technology topics, including wide screen systems, color history, sound development, aspect ratios, preservation, and restoration. The websites feature a variety of resources such as technical publications, filmographies, poster galleries, journal publications, and other reference tools.
  • Archive Grid   Paid Subscription Required
    Search for primary sources in American archives. The site will tell you the title of a work or file and which archive it is in, but you will have to contact each specific archive to be able to access those works.
  • Archive of American Television  
    This website, created by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation's Archive of American Television, is home to more than 500 interviews with TV pioneers.
  • Archives USA   Paid Subscription Required
    Search for primary sources in more than 5,500 repositories and more than 161,000 collections across the United States.
  • Baird: The Birth of Television  
    This site, edited by Richard G. Elen (former editor of Broadcast Sound and a writer on broadcasting history), features articles about inventor John Logie Baird and the early days of television.
  • BFI Features: Charlie Chaplin  
    A bibliography and filmography from the British Film Institute. Includes a guide to other resources.
  • BFI Screenonline   Paid Subscription Required
    Screenonline, run by the British Film Institute, "is an online encyclopaedia of British film and television featuring hundreds of hours of film and television clips from the vast collections of the BFI National Archive, and several hours of recorded interviews with film and TV personalities". Although films may only be viewed by users at British universities, the rest of the website provides vast amounts of information pertaining to everything from comprehensive actors' filmographies to UK box-office statistics.
  • Big Dream, Small Screen   Paid Subscription Required
    The companion website to PBS's special on the history of television in America (part of their ongoing series The American Experience).
  • Bill Douglas Center for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture: EVE (Everyone's Virtual Exhibit)  
    An interactive, digitized collection catalog that allows users to curate their own exhibits. The collection is one of England's largest, strong in the material culture (books, prints, artifacts) that surrounds motion picture history. Based at the University of Exeter, the center also contains a public museum.
  • Bioscope  
    Bioscope features well-researched and indexed posts on a range of early and silent cinema topics as well as a calendar of current and upcoming festivals and conferences on silent cinema. The Bioscope Library compiles links to full-text downloads of books and journals, most published before 1920.
  • BIRTH TV archive   Paid Subscription Required
    A huge database featuring synopses and images of early television shows. Members can get film clips upon request.
  • Black Film Research Online  
    A database of online resources pertaining to the study of black cinema. Users can search for collections contained in archives, public libraries, and university libraries, as well as for more specific online content on black cinema festivals and retrospectives and online scholarly resources.
  • Blues, Black Vaudeville, and the Silver Screen  
    An online exhibit, rich in primary sources, exploring the amusements available to the African American population of Macon, Georgia, from 1912 to the 1930s.
  • British Film Institute Bibliographies  
    The British Film Institute library's series of topical bibliographies and reading lists (some of which are annotated). These bibliographies provide an introduction to the key critical texts for each topic. There is also a general "books about film" list and a list of directories for UK film, television, video, and media.
  • BusterKeaton.com  
    Click "Films" for synopses and an up-to-date calendar of Keaton retrospectives. The list of articles includes some historical reviews reprinted with permission and articles by the fans of the International Buster Keaton Society.
  • Chaplin: A Life  
    A website on the life of Charlie Chaplin by Stephen Weissman, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. The site features a collection of 40 photo essays about the actor with pictures and videos, as well as a news and blog page.
  • Cinematography Collection in the National Media Museum  
    Still images of items from the collection of the UK's National Media Museum related to cinematography and film history. Includes separate galleries for pre-cinema, early cinema, cameras, projectors, posters, makeup, special effects, and the home filmmaking industry.