| Media Works Column
Lights! Cameras! Log On!: The UC Berkeley Media
Resources Center Web Site
A little over two years ago, the UC Berkeley Library began cautiously getting into the web construction business. Today, the web site comprises a sizeable and rapidly expanding body of general information about the library and its collections and services, including individual branch library homepages; subject and area-specialized sites; and links to the UCB Digital Library SunSITE--in all over two thousand documents developed and maintained by dozens of talented library staff. One of the earliest and most unique sites to come out of the Berkeley cyber-shute during this time has been the library's Media Resources Center (web site http://www.library.berkeley.edu/MRC). The Media Resources Center is the primary collection of video, spoken word audio, and digital multimedia materials on campus. The collection currently contains over 6,000 videotapes and discs, 3000 spoken word audiocassettes and audio compact discs, and around 250 digital multimedia and digital full-text programs. MRC's holdings include arguably the strongest collection of works by independent film and videomakers in the Western United States, and one of the strongest collections of videos about American cultures in the country.
Subject Videographies and Beyond
Over the course of the last two years, the roster of MRC videographies has expanded exponentially; the structure and content of these videographies has also changed substantially. Lists which started out as simple videographic citations for MRC holdings with short summaries taken from cataloging records, now include extensive references to film reviews and other relevant articles about the videos. Through arrangements made with a number of key film and video journals, including Cineaste, Jump Cut, Video Librarian, and the ABC-CLIO Video Rating Guide for Libraries, full-text is provided for some of the cited articles and reviews. In addition to article and review information, links to other relevant web sites for particular films is provided--take a look, for example, at the listing for Marlon Riggs' "Black Is Black Ain't..." in MRC's African American videography (http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/AfricanAmVid.html). MRC is also in the process of developing a collection of web-based bibliographies of materials in the Berkeley libraries for selected topics (e.g., "The War in Vietnam and the Movies", at http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/VietnamBib.html).
Along with the arrangements with journal publishers mentioned above, MRC has entered into partnerships with several important film and video distributors (National Asian Telecommunications Assn. [NAATA]; California Newsreel; First Run/Icarus Films; Flower Films) to mount information about the videos distributed by these organizations (in return for deep purchase discounts). Information from distributor catalogs has been linked to specific MRC holdings. A visitor to the MRC Asian American Studies web site interested in a MRC video distributed by NAATA, can, for example, get additional information about the video from the NAATA catalog just by clicking on the title in question. Finally, in addition to including the textual materials discussed above, we have recently begun soliciting quality orginal works dealing with various aspects of film culture from UCB faculty and students. Our first "taker" was a senior student in Political Science, Amy Kashiwabara, who allowed us to reprint her excellent senior thesis on the images of Asian males in the movies. Working with the Berkeley Multimedia Research Center (BMRC) we were also able to incorporate digitized clips of several of the movies discussed in Amy's paper (http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/Amydoc.html). Gateway to the Media Universe
and students, film and video librarians, and educators interested in using moving image materials in the classroom. To these ends, the MRC web has included pages devoted to internet resources on film, TV and other mass media study; visual literacy; media and telecommunications policy; and copyright and intellectual property issues. We've also attempted to gather in one place links to quality distributors of film, video, and multimedia, as well as links to notable media centers and film study institutions outside of UCB. Since it's inception, the MRC web has become one of the most heavily-visited sites in the UC Berkeley library web. The MRC web site is presently serving as the primary catalog of the Center, and the two MRC public access terminals are busy close to 13 hours a day. We have put our print videographies to rest, and are currently doing an increasingly brisk business in emailing MRC's web videographies to faculty and students. Over the last few semesters, we've noted a distinct rise in MRC circulation, at least part of which we attribute to the improved access provided by the MRC web site. We've also noticed that our reference workload from both Berkeley clients and from the great cyber-beyond has skyrocketed since crawling onto the web. We look forward to more challenges, more experimentation, and more success in the future. Gary Handman is Director of the Media Resources Center, Moffitt Library, UC Berkeley. His e-mail address is ghandman@library.berkeley.edu This article is copyright (c) Gary Handman. All Rights Reserved. All commercial use requires the permission of the author and the editors of this journal.
Lori Widzinski, Editor (widz@acsu.buffalo.edu) Revised: 08/27/98 URL: http://wings.buffalo.edu/publications/mcjrnl/v4n2/handman.html  |
