December

Merit Review

Gary Handman, MediaResourcesCenter

Current Scale: Librarian V (proposed scale: Librarian VI)

A few weeks back, an odd but gratifying thing happened to me. I got a somewhat frantic call from a UCB faculty person (someone I hadn’t dealt with before) looking for an obscure set of 16 mm clinical psychology films produced in the late 1960s by a pair of researchers at the University of Illinois. I spent about a half an hour on the phone with him, doing what I could do to locate a source for this elusive and specialized stuff. Although I was finally unable to connect him with the titles he wanted (all lonnnng out of commercial distribution; both Illinoisresearchers deceased; only one or two owning institutions, and all titles in the series most certainly unborrowable), I did manage to turn up more recently produced and commercially available videos that fit the bill reasonably well. MRC ordered the material that day. At the end of our conversation, the faculty person thanked me profusely and ended his conversation by saying, “I can tell that you really love your profession.” Amazing! I told him he was absolutely correct. After 27 years (about 21 in MRC!) I’m still in love with the gig. But the comment got me to thinking about why.

Besides a continuing infatuation with the content, media, and the communities of users and scholars that I deal with every day (I get to work with MOVIES and movie watchers, after all!), I realized that there are other reasons for my workaday contentedness. Having a professional “room of one’s own”—anengaging professional specialty and management of a special collection—have been a big part of this. There’s also the fact that I’m really fond of my professional peers in this field. The national community of media librarians is relatively tiny, and I have achieved a fair degree of recognition and respect in that community. It also doesn’t hurt that I get to hobnob occasionally with documentary filmmakers and distributors I admire. In pondering my career, I also realized--perhaps for the first time--that one of the chief reasons that of I’ve managed to stay engaged with the work and to remain effective in the job has to do with the fact that, over the years, I’ve learned (forced myself?) to take risks and to push myself beyond personal and professional comfort zones. My tolerance for stasis and narrow professional confines (a much different thing than professional specialization) has never been very high, and venturing into new territories has become increasingly important to me the longer I’ve been in the job. I’m both fortunate and immensely grateful to have been given the autonomy, support, and the resources to both excel in my primary job and pursue new ideas, visions, and professional connections beyond UCB. The most notable of these enterprises, adventures, and achievements over the course of the past three years are described below.

MediaResourcesCenter

It’s spooky and more than a bit disconcerting for me to think about the fact that I can see retirement peeking ever so vaguely over the distant horizon. I’ve been thinking a lot about the Media Center lately, about how fortunate I was fall into the opportunity to define and build this special collection and service from the ground up (or at least from Jim Gault’s primordial AVMC bedrock). It is, in short, my intellectual and professional baby, a child of whom I am enormously proud and who will be very difficult to leave. As it currently stands, MRC is one of the strongest and largest media collections in a US academic library. As I’ve mentioned in earlier reviews, MRC has become something of a collection of record for media libraries and media librarians in the US—a fact attested to by the dozens of calls and emails received each month from libraries and university departments all over the US inquiring about acquisition sources for titles listed on the MRC collection web pages (which are themselves cited all over the place—just Google link:

In the past three years, I have continued to build the MRC collection, both around the core and at themargins, including difficult-to-find primary source materials (newsreels, propaganda films, pop culture oddities; ephemeral films; historical television productions); non-mainstream political documentaries and manifestos (9/11 conspiracy videos, anyone?); and documentaries on hot-button political and social topics. As students and scholars have become more media savvy, and as the internet continues to open new media frontiers, these types of cultural ephemera have come under intense scrutiny and use in a wide array of academic disciplines (For a discussion of MRC’s cinematic marginalia, take a look at Barry Bergman’s amusing September 2006 Berkeleyan article “Schlock Today, Dissertation Tomorrow” [

I’ve also continued to build a cinema collection that both represents the international cinema canon and serves as a window into the ways in which Hollywood has historically both reflected and shaped popular notions of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, disability and other socio-cultural issues.

Several other notable collection activities and directions from the past three years:

  • In Summer 2005, UC Center for Media and Independent Learning (CMIL), the oldest university-based media rental and sales operations in the US (est. 1917), permanently closed its doors, ostensibly for financial reasons. A real tragedy. The CMIL catalog had become a staple acquisition source for media librarians and for teachers across the US, a particularly strong source for ethnographic and social sciences films. Most titles in the catalog were distributed exclusively by CMIL. Hoping to avoid seeing a large portion this collection end up as land fill, I made arrangements for CMIL in Fall ’05 to donate its remaining inventory to MRC—about 1100 titles. Over the next several months, I reviewed this inventory, selecting about 500 non-duplicative titles for inclusion in the MRC collection. The balance of the videos was donated to Berkeley PL and to other academic libraries in the US.
  • For the past 20 years, MRC has been closely tied to the Office of Educational Development’s Instructional Mini-grant program. Early in my MRC career, I arranged to have the purchase and retention of all videos bought with this grant money handled by the library. In the past three years, between $12 and $15 K was transferred to the library for such purchases, including significant collections of avant-garde cinema and performance works; Spanish cinema; apocalyptic and utopian science fiction films; 1940s melodramas;and documentaries on Third World development and hunger.
  • I’ve seen more new faculty this semester than any other in MRC (or at least faculty that are new to me). As in the past, I have continued to work closely with these instructors to build collections that meet their teaching and research needs. A few good examples: A chance encounter at a public computer terminal in MRC led me to a discussion with a lecturer in the Slavic Languages and Literatures Department about serious gaps in MRC’s Polish Cinema holding (which we’ve since closed). I am similarly working with Natalia Brizuelaof the Spanish and Portuguese Department to strengthen our holdings of pre-1970s Latin American films. Jeffrey Skoller (new to Film Studies) and Ann Walsh (new last year to Art Practice) and I are continuing to collaborate on broadeningboth MRC’s holdings of avant-garde and experimental film and the Main Library’s print holdings related to new and experimental media. Marina Lavina (new to Mass Communications and Berkeley’s resident Buffy doyen) and I have been talking about filling out our television programming collections. I have worked with all of the above to obtain either OED mini-grants to support MRC video acquisitions (see bullet above) or new faculty start-up funds. Finally: I’ve also worked over the past three years with scads of undergraduate and graduate students working on projects requiring special film resources. The materials purchased to support these students’ work have uniformly enriched MRC’s holdings (e.g. we’ve recently scored a handful of late 1940s and 1950s film and TV stuff pertaining to uranium prospecting [“Lucy Hunts Uranium”…I kid you not!] to support the work of a student documentary-maker in the Graduate School of Journalism).

The continuing increase in the uses of all parts of the MRC collection is, I think, a function of several factors: the depth and scope of the collection; my continuing outreach and publicity efforts; the existence of the MRC web site; and the general fact in the past 20 years, media has become a staple rather than an oddity in both classroom teaching and in scholarship.

Digital Collections

Over the course of the past several years, I have been intensively involved in exploring digital media futures for MRC and the library. The prospect of providing 24/7 remote access to collections for course-assigned viewing and general entertainment and education is tantalizing. In addition, as the videotape materials in MRC age, preservation will become an increasingly urgent concern. In the past two years, we have been rather unsystematically converting physically at-risk, out-of-distribution tapes to DVD under provisions of Section 108 of the copyright law—a questionable solution for the long-term. Conversion of these materials to streamed media may be a better answer.

Digital video is still rocky terrain, to be sure. There are currently no robust standards for digital media creation, storage, or delivery. There are a score of competing propriety hardware and software solutions for streaming digital video. There are numerous issues and problems related to networking and user access to digital video files. Copyright and licensing issues are mind-bogglingly complex. My investigations in this area have involved experimenting with various media editing and encoding technologies for doing in-house digital media conversion (check out one promising technology I’ve hit upon and which I’m currently using in my Sophomore Seminar BlackBoard site—see Teaching section below). I have also been investigating current licensing options with a number of documentary video distributors. These guys are frantically trying to figure out economic models for digital delivery themselves, and, in a sense, media librarians are helping them define the terrain. As an experiment, I worked with Professor Mark Griffith (Classics) this past summer to license and mount a group of Greek classical dramas for use in his class ( (Windows Media files, licensed from Films Media Group). Further explorations and progress in this area will depend to a large extent on the amount of support I’m able to garner from the Library Systems Office.

As part of my work with digital media, I have been vigorously scoping out other national activities and projects in this area. In 2005, I conducted several informal surveys of the members of the media librarians’ listserv that I moderate (VIDEOLIB) to determine which libraries and which distributors are currently supporting digital video collections and systems. In May 2006, I was invited to participate in a small symposium on digital video in Baltimore hosted by Cdigix ( a digital audio and video vendor geared toward the academic market. Interesting meeting, particularly considering that my presentation called into serious question many of my host’s copyright practices and assumptions; see (I think they might have been sorry they had invited me). I was also able to attend a useful conference in Atlanta in March 2005, SURA/ViDe, devoted to digital media ( Attendees at this conference were a completely different crowd than I usually hang out with (I was the only librarian and one of the only content guys at the meeting), and I was able to make lots of useful new connections in the land of digital media gear-heads and wire-wonks.

In 2005 I completed a digital library project begun during the last review cycle: a continuation of the partnership with the Pacifica Radio Archives and other media archives to build a collection of online audio materials related to social activist movements in California. Previous collections have included materials related to the Free Speech Movement and the Black Panthers (see The third installment of this project involved mounting a collection of audio, video, and text materials relating to anti-Vietnam War activities in the Bay Area ( The project entailed working with Pacifica staff and staff of the Freedom Archives in San Francisco to identify materials for the project, and developing a detailed web chronology in which to seat the audio/video links. I’m pleased with the results and by evidence that the site is being used--51K visits from January to November 2006. (Wish I could convince History 7B to use this and my earlier digital media projects site more…)

MRC Web/MRC Blog

As in the previous review period, the development and maintenance of MRC’s gargantuan web sitecontinues to occupy a majorchunk of my time. It is my firm belief that this work is among my most significant contributions to the library, the campus, and to media librarianship and international film scholarship. In 2005, the site was accessed about 4.3 million times (about 10% of the total UCB Library web use); the final figures for 2006 will be substantially higher. As mentioned above, MRC videographies are routinely used as core lists and reference sources by a large number of institutions and individual scholars and teachers. MRC bibliographies on film and mass communications topics are being used just as heavily. I regularly receive accolades for the bibliographies from scholars on this campus and elsewhere, along with requests from authors to be included in these listings. My favorite comment (from a film faculty person at Georgetown): “I must say that you…do a marvelous job with the citation index. Your bibliographies are as good at the British Film Institute’s SIFT.” Very cool!

In the period under review, I’ve continued to compile bibliographies in response to changing curriculum and to special faculty teaching needs on campus. Some examples: “Censorship of the Movies (Hollywood Production [Hays]Code and other topics”; “The Psychology of Movies and Movie Audiences” (to support Marilyn Fabe’s Movie & Psychoanalysis class); “Reality TV” and “Situation Comedy”; and “Lars von Trier” (to support Mark Sandberg’s courses in Scandinavian cinema). See for a full listing.

I’ve recently become interested in the potential uses of blogs and podcasting as library outreach and/or research tools. In connection with these interests, I participated in the discussions of the library’s blog working group (mainly in matters concerning podcasting and other media inclusions),and chaired an ad hoc task force to develop a report regarding library podcasting ( Although I continue to have doubts about the extent of podcasting’s utility in library contexts, I think blogs have significant potential. With the mounting of b2evolution, I’ve been experimenting with an MRC blog to publicize new acquisition, new services, and other MRC goings-on: I’ll be interested in seeing if any of the many on- and off-campus folks I’ve flacked this to will choose to subscribe.

Teaching, Research Consultation, Curriculum Development

By far the most exciting undertaking in the past three years (and maybe in my whole career) was teaching in the Film Studies Program in Spring semester 2005 and Fall semester 2006. In Fall 2005, my long-time pal in Film Studies, Ruby Rich, accepted a teaching position at UCSC. Ruby had taught the documentary film class (Film 128A), a requirement for the major, for over ten years. I smelled an opportunity--a huge challenge--and I approached the departmental chair, Linda Williams, with the idea of my teaching Ruby’s documentary film course. Linda agreed.

In taking over the class, I basically developed the curriculum from scratch. Ruby had taught it as a kind of documentary activist/political counter-cinema class. I wanted to make the course more of a survey of the documentary film form in historical context. (see appended syllabus and course description). I developed a BlackBoard site for the class which included ancillary reading and viewing materials, and, most significantly, a discussion forum in which students were required to post critical analyses of the materials viewed and read for class (see attached example of this interchange). Despite the size of the class (60 students), I attempted to make it as learner-centered as possible: students were assigned to working groups responsible for developing and leading discussions about the films being screened. During the semester, I also scored an enormous coup: Frederick Wiseman, “arguably the most important American documentary filmmaker of the past three decades” ( had been invited to campus for a brief residency by the TownsendCenter for the Humanities. I was able to leverage my small pot of discretionary teaching funds from Film Studies to have Wiseman speak to my class. For your viewing pleasure and further consideration: comments about the class from a few students who were enrolled:

This semester (Fall 2006), I am teaching a streamlined version of the course as a Sophomore seminar (Film 84) that focuses primarily on screening and discussion. Lots of fun, and in some ways even more challenging than the 128A class. (Try getting a group of sophomores to think and talk critically about film in front of peers!).