Share in our discoveries across three projects as we work to provide the first intellectual access to our hidden treasures relating to work and labor in early 20th Century New England, the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair and its period, and Boston local TV news.

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Genre/Form Terms

"The descriptor genre describes the manner in which the intellectual content of a media item is presented, viewed or heard by a user. It indicates the structure of the presentation, as well as the topical nature of the content in a generalized form." from PBCore Genre Element.

Northeast Historic Film collects moving images widely across genres. The PBCore genre picklists are directed at later-twentieth broadcast works (House/garden, How-to, Interview). Our deep collections encompass materials from other eras and audiences, e.g., See yourself, Shorts, Silent films, Sponsored films.
Below is our draft set of Genre/Form terms and their scope notes. Many have been used by NHF for twenty years; a few, such as "See yourself," are newly selected to apply to a growing number of films in our collections created in the 1930s by itinerant creators to draw large local audiences.

The NHF Genre/Form terms and their scope notes are drawn from the Library of Congress's Moving Image Genre-form Guide and other sources. Nancy Watrous at Chicago Film Archives, Martin Johnson, NYU Cinema Studies doctoral student, Albert Steg, Center for Home Movies, Caroline Frick-Page at George Eastman House, Ann Cameron at Scottish Screen Archive, and Paul Eisloeffel at Nebraska State Historical Society have all been truly helpful.

Our decisions in creating the list and its scope notes, and applying the terms in the new cataloging for Intellectual Access to Moving Images of Work Life continue to evolve. Note that we have chosen Amateur as an encompassing term, inclusive of home movies.


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