Home Movie Registry: A Model for Uniting Collections & Users

Dwight Swanson, Center for Home Movies
Skip Elsheimer, A/V Geeks, Center for Home Movies
Jasmyn Castro, National Museum of African American History and Culture
Pamela Vadakin, California Audiovisual Preservation Project

The Home Movie Registry is an online portal that aggregates the catalog records and digitized files of amateur film and video in one central location.  The Registry is a curated search engine for amateur films.  It doesn’t replace the efforts of film archives and their online presence but is a new way to show researchers and site visitors the home movies these collecting institutions have.  The Registry is a new project of the Center for Home Movies (CHM) in partnership with a number of moving image archives and, eventually, any individual with films or videos of their family.  The Registry is a work in progress.  Originally built on the open source platform Omeka and later migrated to WordPress, the Registry has evolved quite a bit since it was first conceptualized.  This plenary will serve as an official launch of the Home Movie Registry to the AMIA community, as well as a case study in how to turn big ideas into a reality through the utilization of low-cost readily available online tools (and a bit of hard work!).

…..