Inside the New Media History Digital Library

January 13, 2023

Eric Hoyt, Ben Pettis, Sam Hansen, Kat Pan, & Lesley Stevenson

Now encompassing more than 3 million digitized pages, the Media History Digital Library (https://mediahist.org/) provides free online access to books and magazines related to the histories of film, broadcasting, and recorded sound.

Over the past year, the MHDL achieved several milestones and major enhancements. What is new? What is different? And what are the best ways to make use of everything?

Recent features that will be showcased include:

• The updated search platform, Lantern, which is now faster, more stable, and immediately indexes new scans.
• The new database and interface for the MHDL collections, which now exceed 3 million digitized pages.
• Spanish language movie magazines digitized in collaboration with the NYPL and the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project.
• Chinese, German, French, Iranian, and Italian film magazines digitized in collaboration with the ACLS supported Global Cinema History Task Force.
• Open access edition of “Ink-Stained Hollywood: The Triumph of American Cinema’s Trade Press” (Eric Hoyt, UC Press, 2022), which offers historical context for many of the trade papers available within the MHDL.
• The first 800 Hollywood pressbooks to be digitized from the WCFTR’s collection of 4,300 pressbooks (yes, we are scanning them all).

Our thanks go to the University of Wisconsin-Madison and ACLS for their support of this event.

Video Recording

Download Slides (.pdf 69.9 MB)

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Teaching Film History with the Media History Digital Library

January 19, 2022

Eric Hoyt, Liz Clarke, Paul Monticone, Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece

The Media History Digital Library (MHDL) has now digitized more than 3 million pages of film and broadcasting books and periodicals for broad public access. How can the MHDL's large collection and its discovery platforms, Lantern and Arclight, be leveraged toward the teaching of film history?

This workshop brings together three instructors of film history who have developed creative and engaging assignments for students using the MHDL. The assignments, which are available on the MHDL's Teaching webpage, range from carefully reading several consecutive issues of the same journal to look for debates within the industry, to examining the same film from multiple methodological frameworks, to writing a silent film using the advice from screenplay manuals of the late-1910s. Liz Clarke (Brock University), Paul Monticone (Rowan University), and Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) will each discuss the assignments they developed. The workshop will be moderated by Eric Hoyt (University of Wisconsin-Madison and Director

Our thanks go to the University of Wisconsin-Madison and ACLS for their support of this event.

Video Recording

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