The National Archives Motion Picture Preservation Lab of the National Archives and Records Administration has recently digitized a large number of historical films and made them available online. The "library stock shots" archive contains 428 reels of film produced mostly during the 1930s and 1940s. Many of the films are of high quality and the range of subjects is broad. As of December 2020, about 398 of the 428 reels have been digitized and catalogued.
As of December 2020, about 398 of the 428 films have been digitized and cataloged. Hymn of the Nations (1944), featuring conductor Arturo Toscanini is an example of one digitized film now available online. View the entire 26-minute performance at: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/47036
The National Archives is also providing an opportunity for members of the public to help improve the database's searchability. Learn more about the National Archives Citizen Archivist programand watch an Online video tutorials (YouTube)
Learn more about the Library Stock Shots database in this NARA blog Post: Searchable Stock Shots: 306-LSS Films Now Online!
Related:
The National Archives Catalog contains over 128 million digitized pages of records.
View all the digital video files in the National Archives Catalog
Listen to an SDPB Radio interview with Heidi Holmstrom, a Motion Picture Preservation Specialist at the National Archives where she works in the Motion Picture Preservation Lab, and Ben Petersen, the National Archives Digital Partnerships and Outreach Director. His team runs the Archives' Citizen Archivist program
Interview Transcript:
Lori Walsh:
Welcome back to In the Moment. I'm Lori Walsh. The Declaration of Independence and America's other founding documents are in the care of the National Archives and Records Administration, but our nation's founding documents are only just the very tip of a very large iceberg of archive documents and other records. Joining us today for Images of the Past, we have Heidi Holmstrom, a motion picture preservation specialist at the National Archives where she works in the motion picture preservation lab. She also happens to be a native of Vermillion, South Dakota. And Ben Petersen, the National Archives' digital partnerships and outreach director. His team runs the Archives' Citizen Archivist program. It's a volunteer crowdsourcing program that helps empower the public to tag, transcribe, and comment on digitized historic records in the National Archives catalog. Heidi Holmstrom, welcome to In the Moment. Thanks for being here.
Heidi Holmstrom:
Thank you so much for having me.
Lori Walsh:
Ben Petersen, welcome as well.
Ben Petersen:
Yes, thank you. Much appreciated.
Lori Walsh:
Heidi, very quickly, we have to know. How do you end up starting in Vermillion and end up at the National Archives? Is there a spark from your early days in South Dakota that caused an interest that brought you to where you are today?
Heidi Holmstrom:
Well, my dad was the pastor of Vermillion First Baptist church back in the late '70s and the early '80s. I was born there as was my sister, but I was pretty young when we moved away, but we still have that connection to Vermillion and South Dakota.
Lori Walsh:
Nice.
Heidi Holmstrom:
And I like going back to visit. I've lived all over the country now, and did a master's degree in history and archives and records management, and that's what led me to the National Archives.
Lori Walsh:
Fascinating. Tell me a little bit about being a motion picture preservation specialist, and just, what's new in these new digitized movies that people have access to that we didn't before?
Heidi Holmstrom:
Well, I feel very lucky to have the job that I have. I've studied motion picture films for a long time, and for the past 11 years I've been able to work with them hands-on and it's really exciting to work at the National Archives, because we're working on all different types of records that were created by all different federal agencies, collected by the federal agencies, and you never really know what exactly you're going to work on each day. You come in, you open up a can of film, and sometimes you just find something incredible and that's what happened with this 306-LSS library stock shot collection.
Lori Walsh:
Alright. Tell us a little bit more about that. Take us to that moment.
Heidi Holmstrom:
Well, all of us in the motion picture preservation lab, we take turns digitizing films for reference. So we have researchers that come into the research room of the National Archives in College Park, and they request copies of films that we might only have a single film copy, and of course we can't hand that to a researcher for them to watch, so we make a digital copy that's available in the research room. And we noticed that there were a lot of requests for this one series, 306-LSS, and we also noticed that it was amazing footage. It was gorgeous. Definitely shot by a very skilled person or people, and we later coordinated with the researchers in the research room to figure out that they were systematically requesting this because they had thought it was interesting, and just the more that we digitize the more that we found. We found outtakes from other films that we know are in our collection. We found outtakes from an unfinished Terry Lawrence production, and he was the man who did some of the New Deal documentaries that are really famous for being so beautiful.
Lori Walsh:
Alright. Ben Peterson. We'll get back to Heidi in a minute, but tell me a little bit about the Citizen Archivist program, how people can participate.
Ben Petersen:
Right, so the Citizen Archivist program, how we like to describe the activity or the impact is that it helps unlock history, and the program is an opportunity for volunteers around the country to come into our catalog and enhance our records in terms of accessibility and discoverability, or the ability to discover those records via search engines and whatnot. There are three main activities for doing this. One is transcribing records, another is tagging records, and the third is commenting on records. To tie this a little bit back to what Heidi was discussing, those library stock images or moving pictures that they digitized, they pulled together a project to actually tag them to enhance the accessibility and discoverability of those records.
Lori Walsh:
Okay, so we're going to talk a little bit about the Hymn of Nations, and we have a little audio clip here but first Heidi, set up what exactly this music is. What Hymn of Nations is more specifically.
Heidi Holmstrom:
Hymn of Nations was a musical piece that was first written by Giuseppe Verdi, and Arturo Toscanini did an adaptation of that during World War II to bring in the national anthems of the allied nations, and he was working with the NBC Symphony Orchestra and the Westminster Choir, along with soloist Jan Peerce who's a tenor, and this was a radio broadcast. It then also made it into a film for the Office of War Information, and it would have been distributed around the world to our allies so they would have something to support the war effort from the front of the arts.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. Let's hear a little bit of Hymn of the Nations from 1944.
Speaker 4:
(singing)
Lori Walsh:
Just very quickly, we can go to SDPB.org to the website. SDPB's Brian Gevik has put together a blog post for Images of the Past like he always does where you can click right to the full film and you can find a YouTube video tutorial on how to be a citizen archivist. So fascinating. Now, Heidi, I just wanted to let listeners know that. What were you going to add?
Heidi Holmstrom:
Oh. Thank you for putting that up on your website. I was going to say that I originally had scanned Hymn of the Nations a year or two prior to doing the 306-LSS project, and I was amazed to discover that the 306-LSS had the outtakes from that film in it, and I was able to recognize it because I had watched it as I was scanning it earlier. We make those connections all the time.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. I watched some of it. The thing that I thought was just really dynamic other than just how fascinating it is to be in that moment, but all the engineers, everybody who's sitting in the background with headphones on making the broadcast go out, all wearing suits and ties. All the women are in pumps and long skirts and sweaters, and it is dress up at a ... It's definitely a different time in America. There's a lot happening there. Ben, I also watched the YouTube video helping people get started in doing this, and what kind of skillset, interest level, because you can follow the things that you are interested in to be of the most use and really have the most experience for yourself too, the most rewarding experience. Tell us a little bit about that.
Ben Petersen:
Absolutely. Absolutely. The qualifications for doing this, or start with an interest in history, for sure, and then having a computer with Internet access and email to sign into our catalog system to actually do the work is the next step. Yeah, we have opportunities for all skill levels, beginner, intermediate, and advanced, and we have a wide variety of subjects of citizen archivist missions that we pull together. For example, right now you can transcribe treaties with Native American tribal nation, or military submarine patrol reports. We have a mission pulled together of records related to African-American history and also military award citations, so there's a wide variety of material to transcribe at a wide variety of levels. One thing that's interesting is we were finding that younger people are not being taught how to read and write cursive in school, so we're finding that the ability to read cursive is turning into a limited resource, and so we really encourage people who have that ability to sign up and contribute to transcription.
Lori Walsh:
Right. Those ratified treaties with indigenous tribes are handwritten. I think that's important for people to know. Yeah, that's what you're looking at there.
Ben Petersen:
That is some of the more advanced transcription that you can engage in for sure. They are 19th century handwritten documents.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. I mean, it sounds obvious, but some people might need that connection made. How do you ensure accuracy, Ben?
Ben Petersen:
Well, we follow a model similar to Wikipedia, so we never declare transcriptions closed, and then citizen archivists have the ability to successively improve on transcriptions if they discover any kind of mistakes in them.
Lori Walsh:
This is not automated. This is largely a human endeavor still. How come?
Ben Petersen:
Well, there is a technology called optical character recognition, with OCR for short. It has the ability to recognize characters that are typewritten, and we have quite a few records that are typewritten, but often the accuracy is just not as good as manual transcription, even with advances in technology. So we highly value these manually transcribed documents. They generally hit a very high level of accuracy and really improve the accessibility and discoverability of our records.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. A Native American photo tagging mission. I thought that one was particularly interesting, and perhaps people in our listening area would be interested in that too, Ben.
Ben Petersen:
Right. There's a series of photographs from the Bureau of Indian Affairs that has been digitized, and we are asking citizen archivists to go in and provide tags, which are descriptors. The keywords, or labels, or terms what you see in the photograph, which we are subsequently using in another product called our BIA Photo Finding Aid.
Lori Walsh:
Alright Heidi, that goes back to what you were saying about just making these connections and once you've seen one thing and all of a sudden you recall it and make that connection with something else. That sort of experience on some level is available to even the beginning enthusiast in some way, if you give a little patience and a little effort, right?
Heidi Holmstrom:
Yes, absolutely. We undertook our project to do the transcription and tagging of this motion picture material, and all of us in the motion picture preservation lab and the motion picture sound and video branch, we have our own backgrounds that inform what we are able to recognize and identify, and the more people we bring in to do that work, the more people, places, things are going to be identified in those films.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. I'm going to jump in because I want to make sure to tell people, once again, go to SDPB.org. Look for today's Images of the Past post, and you can find links to the National Archives, to the Citizen Archivist program. You can find a link to find Hymn of Nations, and so much more. It is just a wonderful, delightful way to spend some time. Heidi Holmstrom and Ben Peterson, thank you so much for your time today. We really appreciate it.
Heidi Holmstrom:
Thanks for having us on.
Ben Petersen:
Thank you.