Vol. 29 No.1, September 2001

Automating the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Library

The challenge: Automate a collection of more than 20,000 books; 1,800 periodical titles; 70,000 screenplays; 22,000 movie posters; 7 mil. photographs; and 200,000 clipping files.

Up for the challenge: Vionnette Dover-Sellers, Information Systems Coordinator, who joined the Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library in 1998. Previously, she worked at the School-to-Work Clearinghouse’s library at Florida State University, where she also earned a Masters degree in Library and Information Studies.

The Academy library has been in existence at various locations in the Los Angeles area since 1927. From 1975 to 1990 the library occupied two floors of the Academy headquarters building on Wilshire Blvd in Beverly Hills. In 1990 it was relocated to its present site: Beverly Hills’ renovated former water processing plant on La Cienega Blvd.

The motion picture-related collection, which is open to the public, is used extensively by students, scholars, members of the press, and entertainment industry personnel. The library staff numbers more than fifty.

When Vionnette came on board, staff members were using different databases for the various collections. For example, the periodical holdings were listed in a Word Perfect document, Questor was being used for the poster collection, and scripts were handled by Paradox.

A consultant was hired in May 1999 to evaluate the library’s situation. The consultant spoke with each of the librarians about their data sets and recommended that the library consider an integrated system. After extensive research, six possible vendors were identified. At SLA in Philadelphia, Vionnette spoke with each of the vendors and narrowed down the list to three finalists: SydneyPlus, SIRSI, and Endeavor. Each of these companies presented to the library director and staff, and the decision was made to go with Endeavor’s Voyager system.

None of the collections were cataloged in true MARC, and this continues to be one of the library’s biggest challenges going forward. The data conversion was the worst task, according to Vionnette. Although the book catalog provided “dirty” MARC records, the other data sets, such as the periodicals holdings in WordPerfect, had to be mapped to MARC. The final data load took place on July 23 of this year.

Some issues that had previously taken a back burner in the Library suddenly became glaring issues, such as weeding and authority. No master list of film titles or clipping files exists. Staff responsibilities have had to shift. The serials librarian, for example, will now be working on the authority file full time.

Vionnette says that the project would not have been a success if the managers of the four data sets hadn’t stepped up to the challenge. Numerous meetings were held to determine internal standards, and major cataloging decisions were made that will affect how items are classified for years to come. Vionnette admits to a few sleepless nights pondering over the intellectual issues, but those challenges are why she became a librarian, she reasons.

Special collections, which include the collected papers of Alfred Hitchcock and Fred Zinnemann, as well as Edith Head’s costume collection, will not initially be added to Voyager, but they will be addressed within the next year or two. “Everything can’t be done at once,” Vionnette laments. Although 280 of these special collections have been inventoried, an additional 200 still have yet to be completed.

After the final data tweaking, some 39,000 records will be included in the database, but that’s only 1% of the library’s holdings! There’s a long way to go. The bright side is that sometime in September the database will be searchable on the Internet: http://www.oscars.org/mhl/

Susan Hendrickson

Jet Propulsion Laboratory