moving image – the DLG B

The Digital Library of Georgia (DLG) is pleased to announce the availability of Georgia town films and home movies digitized by the Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection (BMA). The Georgia Town Films Collection is available at https://dlg.usg.edu/collection/ugabma_bmatf and the Georgia Home and Amateur Movies collection is available at https://dlg.usg.edu/collection/ugabma_bmahm.

DLG staff provided enhanced description of these moving image resources that enables users to locate segments of the moving image footage without having to view the footage in its entirety.

The BMA digitized 126 home movies and 5 town films from Georgia, but did not have the cataloging staff available to create fuller, richer representations of this content unique to Georgia and Georgians. Providing the broadest access for this content demanded more robust description. DLG staff provided shot lists, and, through the use of the University of Kentucky Libraries’ Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS), have provided users with word-level search capability and a time-correlated description that connects the text search term to the corresponding moment in the moving image footage. DLG staff also assigned Library of Congress subject headings to each of the films so that librarians and researchers can locate relevant information without having to refer to various versions of names or keywords.

Items in the Georgia Town Films Collection include films covering the towns of Fitzgerald, Bowman, and Athens. Items in the Georgia Home and Amateur Movies digital collection include a film from the Pebble Hill Plantation film collection that contains footage of African Americans playing baseball in Thomasville, Georgia in their plantation uniforms; a film from the Kaliska-Greenblatt home movie collection that includes a parade honoring Bobby Jones in 1930 on Peachtree Street in Atlanta; a film from the Joseph and Marion Rossiter home movie collection that shows a 1950 St. Patrick’s Day parade in Savannah; and a film from the Newman Family home movie collection that shows congressman John F. Kennedy at the airport in LaGrange campaigning to become President of the United States.

Ruta Abolins, director of the Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection notes: “Georgia home movies and town films document everyday rituals, ceremonies, and behavior, and demonstrate how people really lived. Home movies and town films have been used by history, art, drama, and storytelling classes at the University of Georgia, and they have been viewed and used by documentary filmmakers and writers. Describing these films marking local history can be challenging but making them more widely available via the Digital Library of Georgia and DPLA will make them even more accessible to the people of Georgia and beyond who will have access to the regular everyday life of people who made their own movies.”

About the Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection

The Walter J. Brown Media Archive & Peabody Awards Collection was started in 1995 and currently preserves over 300,000 titles in film, video, audiotape, transcription disks, and other recording formats dating from the 1920s to the present. Our mission is to preserve, protect, and provide access to the moving image and sound materials that reflect the collective memory of broadcasting and the history of the state of Georgia and its people.

About the Digital Library of Georgia

Based at the University of Georgia Libraries, the Digital Library of Georgia https://dlg.usg.edu is a GALILEO initiative that collaborates with Georgia’s libraries, archives, museums, and other institutions of education and culture to provide access to key information resources on Georgia history, culture, and life. This primary mission is accomplished through the ongoing development, maintenance, and preservation of digital collections and online digital library resources. DLG also serves as Georgia’s service hub for the Digital Public Library of America and as the home of the Georgia Newspaper Project, the state’s historic newspaper microfilming project.

Savannah mayor Floyd Adams, Jr. hands out lunches at a summer lunch program for children. Civic Magazine, 2002 Civic Magazine collection, Savannah (Ga.). Research Library and Municipal Archives — Savannah mayor Floyd Adams, Jr. hands out lunches at a summer lunch program for children.
Civic Magazine, 2002. Civic Magazine collection, Savannah (Ga.). Research Library and Municipal Archives

The DLG is pleased to announce the availability of the Civic Magazine collection from our partners at the City of Savannah, Research Library and Municipal Archives. The collection is available at: http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/CollectionsA-Z/civic_search.html

According to Luciana Spracher, the library and archives director for the City of Savannah, Research Library and Municipal Archives, “Civic Magazine was one of the earliest programs of the City of Savannah’s Government Channel 8, the city’s cable access channel now called SGTV 8, run by the City of Savannah’s Public Information Office (PIO). The PIO office was established in 1987 “in an effort to improve communications between City Hall and the taxpayers,’ and help “the public better understand city programs and operations’ (taken from Charles Craig, “Former News Anchor City’s First PR Officer,” Savannah Morning News, 1987). Civic Magazine helped the city government reach out and communicate to Savannah’s citizens in new ways, and connect with new audiences.” She notes: “I think the collection is important overall because it reflects the City of Savannah’s engagement with the community, as well as the unique personalities of our citizens and neighborhoods, something that is not often reflected in more traditional, paper-based records.”

Online access to this collection is exciting because, according to Spracher, “when Civic Magazine was produced (from 1998-2002), U-Matic ¾” tapes were in use by the television and news industry. Now in 2016 everything is digital and we no longer had the equipment to play the tapes back for researchers or even staff. So even though the tapes were inventoried based on labeling and PIO inventories and technically available to the public, we couldn’t access the content.” She notes “Having the old U-Matic tapes digitized and made available online through the Digital Library of Georgia will open up this collection to our citizens, researchers, and City staff for the first time for true use. In fact, I will be discovering most of this collection as a first-time user, and I can’t wait!”

The collection focuses a great deal on city growth and municipal government activities in Savannah at the end of the twentieth century. When asked if this period of time was especially busy for Savannah, Spracher says: “I think we could say that any period of time in city government was busy for its era with either rapid growth or major challenges that we are trying to overcome. The difference here is that in the late twentieth century, for the first time, the City is starting to capture these events through video so we have a more dynamic record of what is going on than just the static approval of a program or the paper invitation to the ribbon cutting, but the actual final event that was the culmination of all the hard work. It helps bring history to life in a different way when we can almost be there by watching and listening to it.”

The city of Savannah is celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Olympic yachting events being held in Savannah. Spracher is particularly interested in looking at all the material in the collection that is related to the 1996 Olympics. She notes: “We had several important Olympic events here in the community as part of the Olympics, including the arrival of the Olympic flag in 1992, the Olympic Torch Relay in 1996, and major community beautification projects leading up to the races.”

We hope that you take the time to view the resources in this new collection and witness the many ways the city government of Savannah has been involved with its community.

Tag: moving image

Enhanced description of Georgia town films and home movies digitized by the Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection now available

Civic Magazine collection from City of Savannah, Research Library and Municipal Archives