American Museum of the Moving Image

Purpose: Sustaining Cultural Heritage The American Museum of the Moving Image, founded in 1981, collects artifacts associated with the history of film and television. The museum maintains the nation's largest permanent collection of moving image artifacts, numbering almost 100,000 objects. The collection explores the changing ways in which moving images have been produced and exhibited. The study of the material culture of the moving image extends beyond the art of cinema and is crucial to the understanding of American culture and social history. In this project, the museum will begin to catalog, digitize, and make accessible online its collection of moving image material culture, using a significant selection of its rare silent film era collection to initiate the process. A key element of this initiative will be the advancement of work on OpenCollection, the museum's commissioned software package, which is already in use in a preliminary version. Through this project, the museum will dramatically increase its capacity for cataloging, access, and display of its materials. In addition, it will make a vital contribution to the field by developing nonproprietary software that can be used by other collections of moving image material culture around the world.