Hot off the Press

For nearly 20 years, Distributed Proofreaders volunteers have worked on a special “Motion Pictures and Filmstrips” project, digitizing thirteen printed volumes of U.S. copyright registrations for educational films, documentaries, industrial films, and theatrical releases from 1912 to 1978. Thanks to their efforts, the series is complete, and these previously hard-to-access volumes are now all available online in searchable form.

Before 1978, the U.S. Copyright Office did not keep electronic copyright records. They were available only in hard-to-search printed catalogs at major libraries, making access to the data difficult.

Distributed Proofreaders volunteers began work on the series in 2008. The project even attracted interest beyond the proofreading community: A group of colleges and libraries, including the Prelinger Library in San Francisco, had been waiting for these catalogs to become available in digital form so the data could be imported into their research databases. These copyright records are official, primary source material (as opposed to non-official sources such as the Internet Movie Database), providing definitive copyright information about older films, including many films that are now lost.

The Distributed Proofreaders “Motion Pictures and Filmstrips” project fills a critical gap in the history of film, finally making an abundance of reliable data available online at Project Gutenberg for film historians, scholars, and archivists anywhere in the world.

Catalogs of Copyright Entries at Project Gutenberg

Motion Pictures, 1912-1939
Motion Pictures, 1940-1949
Motion Pictures, 1950-1959
Motion Pictures, 1960-1969
Motion Pictures and Filmstrips, 1970
Motion Pictures and Filmstrips, 1971
Motion Pictures and Filmstrips, 1972
Motion Pictures and Filmstrips, 1973
Motion Pictures and Filmstrips, 1974
Motion Pictures and Filmstrips, 1975
Motion Pictures and Filmstrips, 1976
Motion Pictures and Filmstrips, 1977
Motion Pictures and Filmstrips, 1978

This post was contributed by Richard Tonsing, a Distributed Proofreaders volunteer.

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