This section highlights the fantastic collection of digital archives for study and research in Film and Media Studies including magazine, periodical and newspaper archives.
Use this material to enrich your research and gain a deeper understanding of a topic. Look at the content and topics covered in the archives to learn about the important issues of a period within the film industry, find film reviews of the time of release and follow an actors career.
Magazine archives
Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive (EIMA)
An archival research resource containing the essential primary sources for studying the history of the film and entertainment industries, from the era of vaudeville and silent movies through to the 21st century. The core US and UK trade magazines covering film, music, broadcasting and theatre are included, together with film fan magazines and music press titles. Includes Variety weekly archive.
Newspaper and periodical archives
Periodical Archives Online
Periodicals Archive Online is a major archive that makes the backfiles of scholarly periodicals in the arts, humanities and social sciences available electronically, providing access to the searchable full text of hundreds of titles. The collection includes: British periodicals (1681 – 1939, 1869 – 2005), American periodicals (1740 – 1940) and historical newspapers:
- Guardian and Observer
- New York Times
- Chicago Tribune
- Los Angeles Times.
Gale Primary Sources
Allows you to search 18 primary source databases from Gale Cengage with a single search. The following databases of interest to Film are covered:
- Nineteenth Century Collections Online
- British Library Newspapers
- The Illustrated London News Historical Archive, 1842-2003
- The Listener Historical Archive, 1929-1991
- Nineteenth Century UK Periodicals
- Punch Historical Archive, 1841-1992
- The Times Digital Archive
- Plus various other newspaper archives
Nexis
An excellent source for online full text UK newspapers, as well as other news sources world wide, You can filter by publication type, world region and language.
ProQuest
It’s not obvious from the interface, but this includes the following historical newspaper archives:
- Guardian and Observer
- Chicago Tribune
- Los Angeles Times
Victorian Popular Culture: a Portal
Victorian Popular Culture is an online archive containing artefacts, printed ephemera, periodicals, printed books and merchandise. The collection is grouped around themes and theme four may be of interest: Moving Pictures, Optical Entertainments and the Advent of Cinema