ABC News VideoSource

https://www.abcnewsvsource.com/vsource

ABC is now the Disney-ABC Television Group, a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company. They represent the collection of (U.S.) ABC News from 1963 on, holding camera raw reels of all news footage shot. They also currently represent AP Archive (moving images), British Movietone News, and Helinet (which offers high definition video aerial images).

Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television

http://www.academy.ca/national/

The Academy, according to their website, “is a national non-profit professional association dedicated to the promotion, recognition and celebration of exceptional achievements in the Canadian film and television industries.”

AFP (Agence France-Presse)

www.afp.com/english/home/

Agence France-Press is the world's oldest established news agency still operating, founded in 1835. Their coverage of European news and events may be unmatched by anyone, except perhaps Magnum (see below). Recently, they have added video.

American Social History Project

www.ashp.cuny.edu/

Part of the Center for Media and Learning at the City University of New York Graduate Center, the American Social History Project aims “to revitalize interest in history by challenging the traditional ways that people learn about the past.”

American Society of Picture Professionals

www.aspp.com

According to their website, ASPP “is a community of image experts committed to sharing their experience and knowledge throughout the industry. Since 1966 this non-profit association has provided professional networking and educational opportunities for those who create, edit, research, license, manage or publish pictures. ASPP has over 900 members in the U.S. and overseas, whose demographics break down roughly as 50% researchers/editors/buyers, 30% photographers, 20% personnel at stock agencies or collections.” They are a membership organization, and their publication is The Picture Professional.

Art on Film Online

www.artfilm.org

Art on Film was launched in 1984 by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and is supported by the Pratt Institute School of Information & Library Science.

ArtBeats

www.artbeats.com

Their slogan is “footage you can use,” and if you are looking for general scenic shots, they’re right. Kenn has used ArtBeats’ HD material for a variety of feature films. ArtBeats features royalty-free moving images but not stills. Owned by Getty Images and located in Oregon , Artbeats offers digital material in standard NTSC , PAL , or high definition video, which you can purchase either by the individual clip or by the collection of related clips. Their tech support is top-notch.

Art Resource

www.artres.com

Art Resource, located in New York , is the world’s largest fine art stock photo archive, licensing fine art imagery to a wide variety of clients. They art imagery from prehistoric times to the present.

AP Images

http://apimages.com/eng/index.html.

Wide World Photos, the photographic division of the Associated Press (AP) wire service, is still maintained by that organization. Other wire services world-wide either control their own collections or have sold them off to archive conglomerates. 

Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA)

www.amianet.org

The North American-based organization of archives.

BBC Motion Gallery

www.bbcmotiongallery.com

This website will link to the various collections the BBC represents, and can get you to contact information for the various BBC offices in the U.S. and around the world from “contact us” on the home page.

Note that in addition to representing CBS News footage, the BBC Motion Gallery also now represents recent HD material from NHK (Japan), Australian Broadcasting Corporation material, and China Central Television (CCTV). They also represent the All-American News collection.

The BBC portion of the collection also includes sub-collections in London, such as the Nugus/Martin Collection, which has archival news material dating back to 1896, and the Huntley Film Archives, which dates back to the Muybridge films of the 1880s, with particular strength in the 1920s and 1930s social landscape.

Black Star

www.blackstar.com

Black Star is a photojournalism agency which, like Magnum Photos, was started after World War II. It has both hard news images and depictions of everyday life from the 1940s on. Black Star also offers an assignment division (they'll shoot what you ask them to shoot). One of the prestigious New York based photo agencies. 

British Universities Film & Video Council

http://www.bufvc.ac.uk/aboutus/index

An excellent resource for filmmakers as well as educators, the website offers a number of links to useful information, including theHermes database of 25,000 television programs in distribution throughout the United Kingdom; a newsreels database, for information about 170,000 stories from about 75 newsreel organizations in England, Scotland, and Ireland; the Researchers Guide Online, based on the data that comprises the BUFVC reference work, the Researcher's Guide: Film, Television and Related Documentation Collections in the UK; Shakespeare, a new International Database of Shakespeare on film, television and radio;.The Television and Radio Index for Learning and Teaching;and TVTiP,  a catalog of the television listings for London’s TV Times between 1955 and 1985.

Center for History and New Media

http://chnm.gmu.edu/index1.html

The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University in Virginia uses “digital media and computer technology to change the ways that people—scholars, students, and the general public--learn about and use the past,” according to their website.  They offer links to a variety of U.S. history websites, and also provide over 100 relevant primary documents (paper and audiovisual). They also offer a wide variety of other resources to both new media and traditional documentary projects on U.S. history.

Stanford Law - Center for Internet and Society (CIS)

http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/

Located at Stanford University’s Law School, the Center for Internet and Society tracks current events on a variety of subjects, including cybercrime, fair use, free speech, intellectual property and copyright, the future of the Internet and digital and electronic surveillance. 

Center for Social Media (CSM)

www.centerforsocialmedia.org

Located at American University , Washington , DC, the Center maintains both a membership of media makers and does advocacy, holds festivals, disseminates news about legal, aesthetic, and other issues affecting especially documentary filmmakers.

Center for the Study of the Public Domain

www.law.duke.edu/cspd

Located at Duke University ’s Law School , founded in 2002, according to their website, “as part of the school's wider intellectual property program. Its mission is to promote research and scholarship on the contributions of the public domain to speech, culture, science and innovation, to promote debate about the balance needed in our intellectual property system and to translate academic research into public policy solutions.” 

Chicago Historical Society

http://chicagohistory.org/research/aboutcollection

The Chicago Historical Society has a collection of audio, film and video, and still images about Chicago and the Midwest . The collection also represents a great deal of material relevant to U.S. history and geography in general. Audio collections include almost 50 years of WMFT’s broadcasts of cultural historian Studs Terkel’s radio show. The moving image collections include Chicago station WGN’s news film from 1948-1977. The still images section includes the collections of The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the photo morgue of the Chicago Daily News between 1902 and 1965, a large collection of Currier and Ives lithographs, and a seemingly infinite number of images of Chicago streets, neighborhoods, and daily life.

Chilling Effects Clearinghouse

www.chillingeffects.org

Chilling Effects Clearinghouse is a joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (see below) and Harvard University , Stanford University , University of CA at Berkeley , University of San Francisco , University of Maine , George Washington School of Law, and Santa Clara University School of Law clinics. They help those using the Internet understand the protections that the First Amendment and intellectual property laws gives to online activities. They seek to fight against activities that would stifle free speech on the Internet.

Corbis

www.corbismotion.com for moving images

www.corbis.com for stills

After Getty, Corbis is probably the second largest commercial supplier of stock images. They offer both royalty-free and rights-managed collections. Corbis owns the famous Bettmann Archive, as well as the art collections of the Hermitage in Russia , the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and several other institutions.

Defense Visual Information Center

www.dodmedia.osd.mil/Imagery_Search.htm

Located at March Air Reserve Base in Riverside, California, the Defense Visual Information Center “is the designated records center for the storage and preservation of visual information records of the U.S. military.”  These are stills and motion picture that have not yet been forwarded to NARA , and therefore remain with the U.S. Department of Defense.

For a search engine for military stills and moving image that have not yet been forwarded to NARA and remain with the Department of Defense (DOD), and for pricing and available formats, see the still images, motion media and CD-ROM links at www.dodmedia.osd.mil/Commercial_Fees.htm.

Fédération Internationale des Archives de Film/International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF)

www.fiafnet.org/

Founded in 1938 as an organization dedicated to the preservation and promulgation of film by a consortium of the BBC in London , RAI in Italy , ARD in Germany , and INA in Paris . They have now grown to include over 120 institutions in 65 countries and are located in Belgium . A great way to find European film researchers.The Belgium-based International Federation of Film Archives, (FIAF, or Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film) is a great place to go for research, if you suspect their membership can help you. You can find a list of their member organizations on their website.

Fédération Internationale des Archives de Télévision/International Federation of Television Archives (FIAT/IFTA)

www.fiatifta.org

Established in 1977 by ARD ( Germany ), BBC (UK), INA ( France ) and RAI ( Italy ), FIAT/IFTA has grown over the years so that it now includes 180 member archives in over 70 countries.  FIAT/IFTA is presently the most important professional organization of broadcasting archives. Its membership “is drawn from public and commercial broadcasters, national audiovisual archives and technical companies catering to the broadcasting industry.” 

Federation of Commercial Audiovisual Libraries (FOCAL International)

www.focalint.org

Based in London, FOCAL represents commercial film/audiovisual, stills and sound libraries as well as interested individuals, such as professional film researchers, producers working in the industry, and organizations such as post-production facilities. FOCAL publishes an annual membership book, and that can be a great way to find a researcher, especially in the U.K. or Europe .

Flickr

www.flickr.com

Owned by Yahoo; a free Yahoo membership is required for use. Flickr is a web community that uploads 2,500 to 3,000 photos per minute from its users. 4.6 million photos on Flickr (as of late January 2008) are offered under a Creative Commons license and so are available for use with a few restrictions.

Folkways Recordings

www.folkways.si.edu (and see SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION below)

Folkways Records was founded in New York City in 1948, and over the next four decades released 2,168 albums, according to Smithsonian’s website. Folkways Records was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution Center for Folklife and Culture Heritage in Washington , DC , which added new materials to the collection.

Footage Farm

www.footagefarm.com

Originally started in London by Orly Yadin, as a way of allowing UK and European users to access materials from the public domain that are in the US government archives, Footage Farm is a large collection of US public domain material that is purchasable on a royalty-free (flat fee) basis. The fee has a sliding scale depending on how much of their material you use. The London office offers PAL digiBeta format masters (as well as other masters made from their PAL digiBeta), and their US office, maintained by the production company Green Mountain Post Films (in western Massachusetts ) offers NTSC materials. In addition to public domain materials, Footage Farm has several private collections (including one of Soviet footage) that are offered on a rights-managed basis.

Footage.net

www.footage.net

“The stock, archival, and news footage network.” Free registration required; from Footage.net you can do individual searches through the databases of their approximately 60 member archives, and you can also do global searches though all the archives at once. Their members tend toward hard news collections, but also include general purpose archives such as Historic Films and WPA Film Library. It provides gateways, for example, to the three major U.S. networks as well as to CBC (the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), CNN, the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA) in France, National Film Board of Canada, National Geographic, Natural History New Zealand, , WGBH (Boston’s PBS station), the German archival footage source Framepool, Getty, Corbis, and many others.

Thus, Footage.net is a primary nexus for searching and contacting many major archives around the world. It is also possible to have the archives come to you: by issuing something called a zap request, your specific need or wishlist is instantly sent to all of the member archives. Archives will then respond to you by email or fax if they have any material. (A downside of zap requests is that often these archives will put you on their mailing lists, and you will begin to receive advertising; you can always unsubscribe.)

Footagebank HD

www.footagebank.com

Founded in 2002 as “the first stock footage company focusing on High Definition (HD) native content,” FootageBank is an online moving image archive, offering some of the most beautiful HD stock footage around. They also partially represent an important military collection, Great American Stock. 

Getty

www.gettyimages.com

Probably the largest commercial archive in the world, Getty offers both still images and motion picture. They now offer a royalty-free section of their web database and holdings. You can specify that their search engine just look for royalty-free imagery, or include rights-managed imagery as well.

Getty represents such collections as the Associated Press film archive, Dick Clark Productions, and Rick Prelinger’s collection of Ephemeral Films (which can be viewed on the Internet Archive), for licensed use. They also represent stock footage collections from Universal Studios and Warner Brothers.

On the stills side, Getty owns or “reps” some of the largest stock shot agencies, such as Stockbyte, The Image Bank and Stone. Importantly, it also represents the Hulton Archive (formerly Hulton-Deutsch), one of the oldest and most venerated collections in the world focusing on fine art. Getty also recently started to represent WireImage, a company that covers entertainment celebrity photography. ( Photos are usually also available on WireImage’s website within a day of being taken, regardless of where in the world it happened. You can  still deal with WireImage directly, which is often easier and more cost-effective than going through Getty.)

Historic Films Stock Footage Library

www.historicfilms.com/

Historic Films, in addition to having the expected public domain materials, has some other very specialized collections, such as (to take one example) erotic and pornographic shorts, novelty films, and loops from about 1910 through the 1970s. They also have many unique entertainment collections. A home movie collection of the early days of punk rock; a run of The Ed Sullivan Show; Don Kirschner’s Rock Concert;and the archives of performers Soupy Sales and Steve Allen are just a few of the forty or so collections they own.

The Imperial War Museum

www.iwmcollections.org.uk/

The largest depository of audiovisual materials on the British involvement in World War II can be found in London . IWM has historical documents, still images, newsreels, military films, maps, charts, artifacts, and almost any other category of audiovisual and paper-based material you can imagine. Contact film@iwm.org.uk for non-commercial educational projects; filmcommercial@iwm.org.uk for licensing and purchasing materials

International Association for Media and History (IAMHIST)

www.iamhist.org  

An “organization of filmmakers, broadcasters, archivists and scholars dedicated to historical inquiry into film, radio, television, and related media.” They are particularly interested in the interaction between history and media.

International Documentary Association (IDA)

www.documentary.org

An international membership organization of documentary-makers, they publish the influential magazine Documentary, and offer annual awards, screenings, seminars and workshops, organize Docfest, DocuDay, and the Pare Lorenz Festival, and do advocacy on behalf of documentarians.

The Internet Archive

www.archive.org

Founded by Brewster Kahle in 1996, the IA is a non-profit based in San Francisco . It was founded, according to the website, “to build an Internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format.” It was Kahle’s vision to maintain “snapshots” of how the World Wide Web looked at certain moments, as he understood the volatility of Internet information, and its value—websites for political campaigns that are long over, for example, or of companies that have gone out of business.

In the meantime, the IA has become much, much more. It has become a source of multitudes of high-resolution, downloadable materials.

The audio collection alone contains hundreds of thousands of items, from audio books and old radio shows (including Presidential radio addresses) to news and public affairs programming and about 40,000 live concert recordings, including Grateful Dead concerts from the 1970s.

The moving image collection includes the “ephemeral films” of the Prelinger Collection, such as Duck and Cover, Dating Do’s and Don’t’s, and other political or social films from the past, as well as educational, instructional, and sales films that reflect American culture over the past decades. Most of the films and audio on the Internet Archive are available for high-resolution download and can be put to a wide variety of uses. (Note that if you need any items from Prelinger’s collection for a licensed use—that is, you need a formal license—you must purchase the footage from Getty Images, which owns the commercial rights.)

Also on the Internet Archive’s moving image site are feature films that can be watched or downloaded for limited uses. They include D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, the noir classic D.O.A. with Edmund O’Brien, Alfred Hitchcock’s British version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, and Fritz Lang’s M.  (You may use some of these titles in the form they appear at the Internet Archive, but restorations and varying versions, such as those done by Kino, Criterion, and other “gourmet” film distributors may be under new copyrights if the change from the public domain version is substantial.)

This is just a tip-of-the-iceberg sampling of what the IA has to offer. Visit it!

The Internet Movie Database

www.imdb.com/search 

The largest online source for film cast, credits, awards, and biographies related to film. Owned and operated by Amazon.com; this site is set up like a wiki, but it is vetted. Use with a bit of skepticism, but it is fairly accurate and comprehensive  The link presented here will be helpful in getting you past the advertising and immediately to the search engine.

theispot.com

www.theispot.com

Theispot is an online catalog of graphic illustrations and design work, available for purchase and download on a rights-managed basis. Prices are set by the artist, not the site, and the site has ongoing collaboration with their designers and illustrators regarding negotiations of unusual uses and requests for price breaks; thus artists are free to choose to allow a particular use at a particular price. While theispot services the print industry more than the film industry, the work found there could be useful in giving a film a particular graphic style, and could also be used for credit sequences, elements in mashups, and the like.  

istockphoto

www.istockphoto.com

iStockPhoto.com is a royalty-free website, and highly recommended for  filmmakers with extremely limited budgets. The company, based in Canada , is owned by Getty Images. Structured as an online cooperative of mostly amateur photographers and filmmakers who post their material on the site specifically for stock sales. Getty provides the web space and a terrific search engine, vets the images for legal and quality issues, and shares profits with the providers. Prices are low and is done by credits. You buy a minimum of 10 credits to start your account; a photograph normally costs from $1.30 to $19.50 at this writing, depending on the resolution in which you want the image (many images are available from the lowest possible resolution of approximately 450x260 pixels at 72 ppi (a 0.184 megabyte file) to a resolution suitable for HD use with zooms and camera moves--9600x5600 pixels at 300 ppi (a 34megabyte file) many times below market value for most rights-managed and royalty-free imagery. iStockPhoto is now including more and more moving image, much shot with high definition cameras. While more expensive than the photographs, the prices—$13 for a low resolution clip to perhaps $65 for 1080p HD—are still far below what they would be at a rights-managed archive.

ITN Source

www.itnsource.com/en/About_Us/Our_Collections/

This website forms a gateway to collections ranging from leading names such as Reuters, Granada , Channel 4, Fox and British Pathé to niche specialists such as Sam Silver, Images of War, Survival ( Anglia ), a large nature photography collection on film, and premium individual clips.

Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Florida Moving Image Archive

www.fmia.org

The Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Florida Moving Image Archive sponsors an annual “Rewind/Fast Forward Film and Video Festival.” One of the highlights of their holdings is the film from local station WTVJ, Florida ’s first television station, but they have grown to include a large number of other collections about Florida history and culture. 

MacDonald and Associates       

 www.macfilms.com

J. Fred MacDonald is a media historian with an eclectic personal collection of both radio and television broadcasts, and all other kinds of archival footage difficult to find elsewhere. Note that he does not own copyright to some of his material (although a good deal of his material is in the public domain, and he can sell it to you). MacDonald is the author of several books, including histories of radio, African Americans on television, television’s relationship to the Cold War, the rise and fall of the television western, and others. If you are looking for something – especially something media-related – and you think you’ll have trouble finding it, go to him first.

Magnum Photos

www.magnumphotos.com

Created in 1947 by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa and others, this is one of the most prestigious agencies for photojournalism available. Many iconic news and lifestyle photos came from Magnum photographers and they offer approximately 350,000 images in their online database. 

McCord Museum of Canadian History

www.mccord-museum.qc.ca/en/

The Notman Collection can be accessed by selecting the “Collections-Search” link at the top of the page

Media History Project

www.mediahistory.umn.edu/

The University of Minnesota's Communications Department has an enjoyable website full of materials about media history.

Motion Picture Association of America

www.mpaa.org

The MPAA sets the movie rating system, and is a strong advocate for the extension of copyright terms. They oversee distribution and other aspects of the Hollywood motion picture industry.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

http://grin.hq.nasa.gov/howtouse.html

  GRIN is the online search mechanism for NASA images.

National Geographic Images

www.ngsimages.com

National Geographic has all kinds of ethnographic, nature, and animal footage. Most of it is rights-managed, but some is royalty-free

National Information Center for Educational Media Film & Video Finder

www.nicem.com

As an educational advocate, NICEM offers a vibrant Video Finder database, which includes documentaries and experimental films in addition to strictly educational films, but does not include entertainment films. The Finder is at: www.nicem.com/database.htm.

National Library of Medicine and National Institutes of Health

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=nlmcatalog

NLM and NIH both have large collections of especially still but also moving images relating to health and medicine. Much of this material, created by and for the US government, is in the public domain, but the libraries do contain other materials that are owned.

NBC News Archives

www.nbcnewsarchives.com.

NBC is now NBC/Universal (as in Universal Studios). In December, 2007, the news archive moved back to 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York from its previous headquarters in Fort Lee , New Jersey .

Although you can search and view clips online, as with most such catalogs, it’s incomplete. Normally, a request for in-depth research needs to go to the head of the archive, Yuien Chin, via the online footage request form, or by fax or email (Kenn recommends fax or email), and then it will be assigned to an internal researcher, who will work with you and contact you directly. NBC is one of the most efficient of the network news archives.

The Newberry Library

www.newberry.org/

Located in Chicago IL , the Newberry Library is, according to their website, “one of the world’s leading independent research libraries.” It is one of the best sources in the U.S. for maps and cartography (including antique maps of all kinds, all subjects, and all vintages) and also for old manuscripts, antiquarian books, and anything on paper that has to do with the humanities.

North Wind Picture Archives

www.northwindpictures.com 

North Wind, located in Maine , may be your easiest way to get those 19th century (and early 20th century) images that are held in the magazine collections of the Library of Congress and elsewhere. If you send them a wishlist, they will send you back, gratis, a stack of photocopies of their holdings, arranged by subject, that might suit your needs. When you’ve made your selection, they will download to you high resolution files, which can also be hand-tinted, or send you a very clean stat of the image(s) you order.

Northeast Historic Film

www.oldfilm.org/movingimages

Northeast Historic Film is one of the largest regional archives in the US . Their holdings relate to the history, industry, and life of the New England states ( Maine , Vermont , New Hampshire , and to a lesser extent, Massachusetts ). The collection includes news footage from New England stations WABI, WAGM, WCAX, WCBB, WCSH, WLBZ,WMTW, WVII, and WCVB; in addition, one of the largest home movie collections in the United States, plus industrial collections, university collections, and material from other archives and donated material amounting to over 250 separate collections, all concerning New England.

Oxford Scientific

www.osf.co.uk

“The natural world specialist.” Oxford Scientific in the UK , is almost entirely rights-managed and renowned for its photography of natural and animal life. Much of it is time-lapse or created for scientific study. Older items are in film, newer are on tape.

Profotos

www.profotos.com

Profotos provides a membership organization of still photographers from around the world, and also provides other research-oriented materials that are most useful to filmmakers.

In particular, the education section of their website provides a "reference desk," with glossaries, technical information, photo schools, photo labs, and, most important, a list of links to photo news and stock agencies around the world (with some out of date links, but still useful for the agencies' names) at www.profotos.com/education/referencedesk/stockagencies/index.shtml.  

San Francisco Bay Area Television Archive

www.library.sfsu.edu/about/collections/sfbatv/

From the website: "a unique moving image collection that chronicles 60 landmark years of social history and cultural revolution in the San Francisco Bay Area." This collection is located at San Francisco State University's downtown campus; access is by appointment only. The Collection includes news footage from Bay Area stations KPIX and KQED, as well as a small amount of material from KTVU. 

The Smithsonian Institution

www.si.edu

A quasi-government institution, the Smithsonian is funded both by the US government and by private donations. For that reason, many of their materials are not in the public domain, but fees can be reasonable—often more reasonable than access.

American Art Museum : http://americanart.si.edu/search/search_artworks.cfm

Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage: www.folklife.si.edu/index.html

Smithsonian Folkways recordings: www.folkways.si.edu

Museum of American History :  http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/index.cfm

National Air and Space Museum : http://collections.nasm.si.edu/code/emuseum.asp

National Anthropological Archives and Human Studies Film Archives: www.nmnh.si.edu/naa/guides.htm

Southeast Asia-Pacific Audiovisual Archive Association (SEAPAVAA)

www.seapavaa.org

The Southeast Asia-Pacific Audiovisual Archive Association, (SEAPAVAA), based in the Philippines, is a good place to locate Southeast Asian and Pacific Rim archives and footage. A useful publication from SEAPAVAA is Views from Southeast Asia : Films from the Region, published in 2001. It includes articles on holdings in the Philippines , Vietnam , Laos , Cambodia , Thailand , Malaysia , Singapore , Indonesia , New Zealand , and Australia and was published in 2001.

SPPN Images

www.sppnimages.com/

A privately owned archive, the successor to Sherman Grinberg Film Library. Pathé, Paramount News, and Paramount ’s Greatest Headlines series are among their holdings.

The Telco Report

www.telcoreport.com

Telco Reports has been around since the 1960s, and forms a kind of bulletin board of producers and funders—as such, it’s a good way to see if other films have been done on your subject. If you can’t find what you’re looking for online, there is a CD-ROM with data from mid-1990s to 2003; you can also contact the company directly to buy a specific search. The Telco website also offers links to some other film archives.

Thought Equity Motion

www.thoughtequity.com

Thought Equity currently represents the March of Time newsreels (which, like other online databases, have been cut into short—approximately 20 seconds— clips, not allowing you to get a sense of the newsreel as a whole). They also represent footage from NBC News*, National Geographic*, HBO and Sony, and, through Australia ’s FilmWorld, various Australian archives. These include CineSound (Australian Movietone) and the Australian tourism collections.

Thought Equity also represents the stock libraries of Paramount and Sony Pictures studios, and the NCAA.

* Note that in general, you are better off looking for NBC and National Geographic footage at those providers’ websites.

U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

http://www.ushmm.org/museum/mission/

"United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is America's national institution for the documentation, study, and interpretation of Holocaust history, and serves as this country's memorial to the millions of people murdered during the Holocaust....Chartered by a unanimous Act of Congress in 1980 and located adjacent to the National Mall in Washington, DC, the Museum strives to broaden public understanding of the history of the Holocaust through multifaceted programs: exhibitions; research and publication; collecting and preserving material evidence, art and artifacts related to the Holocaust; annual Holocaust commemorations known as Days of Remembrance; distribution of education materials and teacher resources; and a variety of public programming...For information on the archival resources, go to http://www.ushmm.org/research/collections/

U.S. Library of Congress (LC)

http://rs6.loc.gov/ammem/browse/ListAll.php

Individual collections (alphabetized list of highlights):

The Library of Congress Motion Picture and Television Reading Room website is at www.loc.gov/rr/mopic/. This website can link you to various collections as well as give you basic information for visiting the research space. As of this writing, their physical vaults are being relocated to Culpepper , Virginia , and so various collections go in and out of availability as the move is prepared for.

The American Memory Collection home page: http://rs6.loc.gov/ammem/index.html.  F

Civil War photography collection: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/cwphtml/cwpabt.html

Early Films Collection: www.loc.gov/rr/mopic/earlymps.html.  Includes works by the Thomas Edison studio and the contemporaneous American Mutoscope and Biograph Company (later just the Biograph Company) These make up the bulk of what is called the Paper Print Collection (1894-1915), a true treasure. Information and a search engine for the Paper Print Collection and the George Kleine and Theodore Roosevelt collections can be found at this URL.

A website with links to available digital files of PD recorded sound from the Edison Historical Site in New Jersey is: www.nps.gov/edis/photosmultimedia/the-recording-archives.htm. A website for accessing Edison disks at the Library of Congress American Memory Collection is: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/edhtml/eddcalpha.html.

The Edison Site collection in New Jersey includes 28,000 78 rpm disc phonograph records (a predecessor to the LP); 10,000 cylinder phonograph records (the earliest format, designed for the first Edison recording machines were cylindrical in shape), and 9700 disc master metal molds, used for pressing the mass-produced disks themselves.  With a grant from the Grammy Foundation, archivists are working to make preservation-quality digital transfers of portions of the collection, some of which can be heard online (www.nps.gov/archive/edis/edisonia/sounds.html) and are broadcast by radio station WMFU-FM in a show called Thomas Edison’s Attic (www.nps.gov/archive/edis/edisonia/attic_radio.htm).

Note that through a joint effort of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the LC, the paper print issues in MOMA’s collection have been released on a four- DVD set, Edison: The Invention of the Movies. See www.kino.com/video

NET Collection:  NET was created in 1952;  when PBS was formed in 1969, the two merged to form WNET , the PBS station in New York . Hence, WNET controls rights to the NET Collection at LC. For a Library of Congress project about preserving public television, see: www.ptvdigitalarchive.org/purpose/.

The Paper Print Collection (see Early Film Collection, above)

Vanderbilt Television News Collection (see below): Starting in the 1970s, the U.S. Library of Congress began buying copies of every Vanderbilt tape of nightly news broadcasts, so most of this valuable collection can also be found here.

U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)

The National Archives' online search utility, ARC, can be found here: www.archives.gov/research/arc/index.html. Follow the “search option” link to perform an advanced search. Also note both the “How to search” link (as ARC searches differ in some ways from other search engines), the links to specific subject areas, and the pull down search options on the advanced search screen.

A more thorough guide to the NARA stills collections can be found at www.archives.gov/research/formats/still-pictures-guide.html#9. Much of the information that appears in this section is thanks to the Guide to the Holdings of the Still Picture Branch of the National Archives and Records Administration, compiled for the Archives by Barbara Lewis Burger.

Ford Foundation Collection is not catalogued on line, but rather has to be researched at the Archives, or by obtaining the out-of-print published catalogue of the collection by Mayfield Bray (see bibliography).

Harmon Foundation Collection can be accessed through the National Archives website at www.archives.gov/research/african-art/. This site will give you access to the African Art contained in the collection. At least some of the motion picture materials from the Harmon Foundation do appear on ARC as well. Enter “Harmon Foundation” in ARC to pull up whatever from the collection has been digitized. Film researcher David Thaxton is, as of this writing, producing a catalogue/finding aid for the Harmon Foundation Collection.

Longines Chronoscope television interviews (1951-1955) are being released on home DVD . They are in the public domain, and most or all of them are searchable through ARC (see above).

Presidential libraries, see  www.archives.gov/presidential-libraries/visit/.

University of Texas , Austin - Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center

www.hrc.utexas.edu/

The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas , Austin , dedicated to the study of the arts and humanities. The Ransom Center , to quote their online mission statement, “acquires original cultural material for the purposes of education, scholarship, and delight.” The center houses fine art from Mexican artists, paintings by American and English literary figures including Anne Sexton and D.H. Lawrence, posters relating to the Spanish-American War; the papers and archives of actress Gloria Swanson and screenwriter Ernest Lehman; music manuscripts from ancient Gregorian chants (one of the largest collections in the United States.) to the jazz of Charlie Parker… Also the papers of magician Harry Houdini and one of the most important photographic collections around, the Gernsheim Collection.

The Vanderbilt University Television News Archive

http://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/web/tvnews/collection/.

Vanderbilt has been taping evening news of all three networks since mid-1968, some CNN since 1995, news special reports, Presidential speeches, conventions, news conferences by presidents, etc.,and maintains those off-air tapes, providing VHS reference tapes to researchers, filmmakers, and the public for a nominal fee. They are for research only, and rights (and a clean master copy) must be gotten from the network or news organization that owns them.  Starting in the 1970s, the U.S. Library of Congress began buying a copy of every tape, so most of the collection can also be found there.

The Visual Researchers' Society of Canada

www.visualresearch.ca/

 According to their website, “The Visual Researchers’ Society of Canada exists to promote excellence in the field of visual research in all media. … The VRSC aims to raise the profile of visual research as a profession; to set quality standards for the conduct of visual research; and to set guidelines for the conditions of work.  Above all, our aim is to improve the quality of work done by visual researchers.” VRSC was co-founded by film researcher Elizabeth Klinck, who is interviewed in this book.

The Wells Fargo History Museums

http://www.wellsfargohistory.com/history/history.htm

The Wells Fargo Company maintains museums in California , Oregon , Alaska , Arizona , and Minnesota   (see http://www.wellsfargohistory.com/museums/museums.htm, and has its own archival collections. Primarily of interest for stills and artifacts, people rarely think of this company when they think of archives, but they can be a valuable history resource.

WireIMAGE

www.wireimage.com/

Free registration is required to use the powerful database and a system for both viewing and downloading images from this company that provides thousands of celebrity portraits and other celebrity images (especially entertainment celebrities) . In many cases, you will also need to clear the personality or actor who appears in the image (see Chapter XX), unless spot news or a claim of fair use is involved. Although WireImage is now also represented by Getty, it may be easier to search through the WireImage website if you are looking for recent (1990s-present) photographs. If you want a combination of older and newer images of a celebrity, you may want to access Getty (see above).

The WPA Film Library

www.wpafilmlibrary.com/

The WPA Film Library represents the British Pathé newsreel collection in the United States and has transferred all of the original 35mm footage to D2 video. WPA also owns rights to the old 1960s television music shows Hullabaloo and Soul!, among other goodies. They are one of the four major general-purpose commercial archives in the US , along with Getty, Corbis, and Historic Films.