ARC and Stuff

Hi again-

I trust you had a wonderful holidays.

Before I go much farther, I guess I should clarify my intent. One of the purposes of this blog is to generate interest in what I consider an untapped resource of film footage that is owned by the American people. The problem is that most Americans don't seem to know it exists. Therefore, this blog is designed to provide information and assist writers, researchers, historians, film and video makers, content producers, genealogists, and many others in locating the historically rich, celluloid-based, moving images preserved in the motion picture film holdings of the U.S. National Archives. To do this I plan to provide a synopsis of each RG held in the National Archives that contains films and annotate a few example titles. My hope is that this will be enough information for those interested to dig more deeply either on line via ARC or in person at Archives II.

Now, a few words about ARC. The Archival Research Catalog is NARA’s latest computer based research tool to provide access to the content and physical descriptions of all their archival holdings. The stated goal is to have 95 percent of all records input into ARC by 2016. As this book goes to press, over 63 percent have been cataloged. Obviously, ARC is still far from complete. In fact, the current NARA mantra appears to be, “just because it’s not in ARC doesn’t mean that it’s not in our holdings.” As such, some of the information presented in this book is subject to change without notice. Unfortunately, ARC is not the most user friendly computer database program in the world to use. It drives more than one professional researcher I know crazy when they try to use its search functions. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll want to use ARC to review the latest catalog updates and to fully explore the RGs and their individual series listed in the following pages. The ARC main web page is located at: www.archives.gov/research/arc and has much more detailed information for your review.

'Till next time.
Phil
http://www.pwstewart.com/