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Primary Sources: Film and Sound

Let's start at the very beginning. A very good place to start.

Film and Sound

-Academy Film Archive

“Dedicated to the preservation, restoration, documentation, exhibition and study of motion pictures, the Academy Film Archive is home to one of the most diverse and extensive motion picture collections in the world.”

-The American Archive of Public Broadcasting

The American Archive of Public Broadcasting is a joint project compiled by the Library of Congress and WGBH in Boston. The Archive consists of 40,000 hours of radio broadcasts. Its mission is to “preserve and make accessible significant historical content created by public media, and to coordinate a national effort to save at-risk public media before its content is lost to posterity.” A selection of the Archive’s collection has been digitized and made available online.

-American Memory Collections: Original Format: Motion Pictures

The Motion Pictures collection includes over 700 digitized films digitized spanning the years 1894 to 1999.

-Anthology Film Archives

Anthology’s mission is to “preserve, promote, and exhibit independent, experimental, and artist cinema. Through modern preservation techniques – both photochemical and digital – Anthology works to make titles accessible to the general public through screenings, archival loans, on-site research, and online viewing.”

-Civil Rights Digital Library

-G. Vincent Voice Library

The G. Robert Vincent Voice Library is a collection of over 100,000 hours of spoken word recordings, dating back to 1888.

-Internet Archive: Moving Image Archive

The Moving Image Archive includes 2,000,000 films documenting culture, industry, war, art, economics, television and radio, etc.

-The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia

The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia collects, preserves, and provides access to audiovisual materials relating to Australian history.

-Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library

The Oral History Center has conducted over 4,000 oral histories on varying subjects. Nearly every interview that has been transcribed is available on the OHC website.