The Silver Screen Oasis

Thank you, Moira!

There was something about the last row, middle, that drew my attention. 1941 was such a great year. Then I did a search for "John Alton" and -- oh, my -- several references from the '30s when he was helping establish the movie industry in Argentina and working for Paramount in Europe.

Yes, I bookmarked the site.

moirafinnie wrote:Great news! A vast array of more of the 20th century's periodicals related to motion pictures have recently been gathered and made readily searchable by a group called Lantern who have expanded access to the holdings of The Media History Digital Library and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Communication Arts..

You can see more about Lantern here:
http://lantern.mediahist.org/

I've finally checked this out -- what a great search engine/front end system! I believe all or most of the publications are housed at the Internet Archive, and this makes it so simple to find articles on one's favorite subject. Thank you!

It was a pleasure to share this news, PT.

One warning: so many people have been logging onto the Lantern site since this was announced publicly, there have been reports of outages when the site went down due to heavy traffic a few times. I haven't encountered any issues myself...unless you count the overwhelming desire to forget everything and spend hours on end poring over this fascinating and arcane cinema history in these original sources.

Moira, you wouldn't believe what I used to do, to look for features and news items on my favorite subject. I would download OTR publications that had been digitized and made available online, one at a time, then search through them manually. When I was lucky, the file was in text format so I could search for key words; when I was unlucky the file was in image format and I would visually inspect each page. I found some good items that way, but I don't think I could bring myself to go through it again. This is a breeze, a snap -- the job's a game*.

*A reference to Mary Poppins.

-