Preservation

We were recently contacted by the Woburn Historical Society in Woburn, MA looking for information about a lost silent film called The Heart of the Woburn Girl.

Well, we'd never heard of it, nor could we find out anything about it from our usual sources.

Calling all applicants for the 2012 William S. O'Farrell Fellowship!

The application due date is quickly approaching and we are eager to get YOUR application.

The William S. O'Farrell Fellowship is awarded to an individual engaged in research toward a publication, production, or presentation based on moving image history and culture, particularly amateur and nontheatrical film. The Fellowship includes a $1,500 stipend and additional archive and staff support.

We hope that this video clip from the Robert Decker Collection brings a smile to your face!

More information about this collection can be seen at www.fairfilm.org.

As NHF continues development on our Collective Access collections management database and catalog, other institutions in Maine are working on making their catalogs accessible online, too. Check out the new resources that our friends at the Maine Historical Society and the Penobscot Marine Museum have just revealed:

http://mainehistory.wordpress.com/2011/11/15/library-finding-aids-moving-online/

Part III of the Smithsonian Collections blog posts featuring footage screened at NHF.  There is a beautiful clip to view in the post. Human Studies Film Archives Mystery

Thanks to Pam Wintle, NHF Board member and Smithsonian Film Archivist for alerting us to this two part blog for the Smithsonian Institution Research Information System (SIRIS) for archives month—it’s the story of some incredible Japanese film footage.  NHF and the 2011 Summer Symposium are noted and linked to.

Jack Brighton, Director of New Media & Innovation at Illinois Public Media, at U/I Urbana/Champaign, was honored as a recipient of the prestigious 2011 Chancellor's Academic Professional Excellence Award. Jack is a resource and great friend to NHF. Congratulations.  Read more about Jack and his work.

Amateur film scholar Caitlin McGrath will present her research and findings on the Cyrus Pinkham Collection from Northeast Historic Film's holdings at the annual conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) in New Orleans March 10 - 13, 2011. Her presentation, titled "Be Beautiful?: The Amateur Films of Cyrus Pinkham," will lead the panel "Alternative Film Histories: Hollywood and the Amateur Revisited" which Caitlin is co-chairing with Charles Tepperman.

In Bradenton, Florida, the other day a man named Danny Patt took a notion and searched that name on the Internet. His father's name was also Danny Patt and he was surprised when one of the results was a DVD for sale on Amazon.com, Aroostook County 1920s. I had the pleasure of Mr. Patt's call on Monday and was able to give him the production date, 1994, and how Northeast Historic Film came to preserve the film and ask his father to compile a musical score as accompaniment.

David Wells of the National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF) reports that a clip from our Wohelo-The Luther Gulick Camp Collection is among the most popular on their site, with an estimated 1,027 viewings from June 1 to August 31! NFPF generously funded the preservation of 2 reels from this amazing collection in 2002.