ResearchBuzz

Oh dear, I’m terrible at watching movies in this country, and now I’m going to try to cover a resource from Down Under. Here goes… Australian Screen, at http://australianscreen.com.au/ , covers Australia’s movie heritage. The site has over 1500 clips from other 500 films and television shows.

You can do a keyword search (by title or by full description) or click on the Titles in the nav bar to get a page of browsable information. Here you can browse moving pictures by genre or category (newsreels, ads, short features, documentaries, etc.) or you can go to a page with indigenous content links.

I know nothing about AU movies, so I started by browsing feature films. 103 titles were listed with a default alphabetical sorting (you can also sort them by year.) The listings have a screen capture, title, year of production, and small summary. The titles also have their own pages, which contain larger descriptions, curator’s notes, credits, and information on title availability. On the right of the title pages are video clips. The ones I looked at were generally a couple of minutes long. Each title has tags as well. Some of the pictures have location maps — Google Maps that show filming locations, etc.

The descriptions were interesting but I found the curator’s notes fascinating — they put each item into a historical perspective. The deconstruction of Crocodile Dundee — a movie I really didn’t want to mention because I didn’t want to look like I was picking on Australia — was fascinating. I had no idea this Saturday matinee I enjoyed over twenty years ago was actually such a complex — and controversial — cultural statement.

In addition to the film information, Australian Screen also has a Educational section, which groups all the films which have teachers’ notes (along with warnings about films with possibly-inappropriate content.) There’s also a timeline, and a directory of people involved in the Australian moving-picture industry. A great read.

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The University of West Florida has launched a portal for finding pointers to holdings on West Florida history. The collections contains information on more than 700 collections of family papers, business records, maps, photographs, and so on. It’s still under development but you can check it out at http://fusionmx.lib.uwf.edu/archon/ .

You can browse several different ways (collection title, subject, digital library, etc.) but you can also search by keyword and choose whether or not to include box lists in your search (box lists; the specifics of what’s in each collection, it’ll get you a lot more results.) Searching for Hurricane found over 100 results when including box lists (um, how’d that paper doll box get in there?) But, while the collections are thoroughly described, don’t expect to see content here. It’s just a list of what’s available, collection overviews, and access information.

There’s a lot more to be done here (as you can tell when you visit the digital archive page) but there’s enough of a start that you’ll find plenty to browse.

I think I have mentioned before that Amazon’s search engine gives me a rash. But yet the site contains so much information I can’t help using it. And despite the fact that Amazon’s regular search engine bothers me a lot, there are other offerings on the site that are making it more and more fun to use. Forum threads, for example, are now available by RSS feeds.

You may have noticed at the bottom of Amazon’s product pages there are links to forum threads. Sometimes all you need to do to find interesting discussions to monitor is find a related book, then look at the discussions going on around that book. Other times you might want to do a search outside Amazon for interesting threads. If you want to use Google to search Amazon for forum threads, here is your base search:

site:amazon.com inurl:forum

Add your keywords. Note also that Amazon has a forum for each tag that’s been used on Amazon, and often they don’t have any discussions around them. You can eliminate those by adding -inurl:tag to your search.

If you do a search like lactose intolerant site:amazon.com inurl:forum you’ll see a couple dozen results covering everything from parenting to making yogurt to, for some reason, Sony. Once you’ve found a topic of interest that you’d like to monitor, look for the RSS feed link and symbol in the right nav. If you have an Amazon account you can also sign up to get e-mails when a forum thread updates.

I think for very technical, computer related discussions, I would still refer to Usenet, Yahoo Groups, or Google Groups. But I think for more consumer-oriented discussions or “everyday life” discussions, this’ll be the place I start. Amazon has a ton of traffic and has made it very easy for anyone to put in their two cents.

Now if I could just use the regular search engine without tearing all my hair out…