The Media History Digital Library

Media history is a growing subfield within both history and media studies scholarship. In a rapidly changing digital culture that emphasizes novelty, scholars in both of these disciplines have highlighted the importance of engaging diverse histories of media from the analog age. A valuable resource in this effort is the Media History Digital Library (Mhdl), an extensive, open-access collection of fully digitized and searchable trade publications, fan and technical magazines, and other out-of-copyright materials relating to the development of mass media, particularly in the United States. The Mhdl was founded in 2011 by David Pierce, the former leader of preservation efforts at the British Film Institute's National Film and Television Archive, and is currently directed by Eric Hoyt of the University of Wisconsin. Describing the mission of the Mhdl in the Journal of Film Preservation in 2013, Pierce wrote, “Few archives can hope to put their nation's entire cinema history online, but what if you could republish the contemporary documentation of the classic period of your national cinema's history?” (David Pierce, “The Media History Digital Library,” Journal of Film Preservation, April 2013, p. 35, emphasis in original). With this description, Pierce highlighted both the innovativeness of the Mhdl project and the limits of its scope. While the Web site does not feature historical media products, such as films or radio programs, it does provide vast documentation of the industrial and fan cultures that surrounded the production and reception of these media in their time. This opens up exciting opportunities for students, researchers, and fans to place historical media in a broad social context. Additionally, while the Mhdl includes periodicals dedicated to a variety of mass media formats, including radio, lantern slides, recorded-sound technologies, and early television, the bulk of the materials are focused on film. Finally, while the site features some international publications, such as German and Italian film magazines in the Global Cinema Collection, and Dutch and French catalogs in the Magic Lantern and Lantern Slide Catalog Collection, the majority of the collection covers the national mass media landscape of the United States

Art history · Digital media · Digitization · Documentation · Library science · Media studies · Movie theater · New media · Political science · Scholarship · Sociology · Telecommunications · World Wide Web · Comics and Graphic Narratives · Computer Science · Digital Games and Media · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · History · Law

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