ResearchBuzz

A retired Air Force veteran has started a Web site dedicated to old military films. His web site currently has over 600 films available (with plans to release about 1200 more), and it’s extensive enough that you don’t want your kids browsing it alone…

The site’s called Real Military Flix and it’s at Http://realmilitaryflix.com . A nav on the left provides categories from films, from WWI through WWII, several decades, and finally Iraq and Iran. You also have the option of browsing the most popular videos and “mature” videos.

The mature videos are mostly not sexual in nature (well, there’s an instructional video on sexual hygiene) but but instead are graphic war and victim shots and in one case, an execution by firing squad. The most popular videos also show some pretty strong films, including one on animal experiments that made me sick even from the screen shot.

But there are over 600 films here so I won’t concentrate on the overly-graphic ones. The WWI films include a welcome home parade shot in New York (with a Civil War veteran in the last scene), the Signal Corps in action, and basic training at Camp Sherman. There’s a section for films in the 20s and 30s that include newsreels (Albert Einstein!) and documentaries. All the sections include extensive descriptions and recommendations on what to look for. Each video has its own page with a large embedded video frame and stats for the video (runtime, year, audience, etc.) The video pages don’t have comments available but there is a link to the site’s forums.

The site has a few more sections, including military headlines, links, and a games page. (Which seemed a bit out of place; going to a military films site to play Coffee Tycoon?) The newsreels and documentaries are terrific, with plenty of historical information. You’ll just have to be a bit careful about what you decide to watch.

The University of Rochester Libraries has a Web site, “Lincoln and His Circle”, available at http://www.library.rochester.edu/index.cfm?page=379#”. At the moment the site is more of an index-with-images of letters that were written to/from Lincoln, but 26 of them have been transcribed and there’s a promise of more transcriptions over time.

You can browse the letters by writer or recipient, or go through them by date. You can also search by keyword. A search for emancipation found five results, with three of them written to, and one written from, Abraham Lincoln. (The other one was written from JL Motley to William Henry Seward.)

When you click on the ID number of the letter — for example, the letter from James Henderson to Abraham Lincoln — you’ll get a set of vital statistics about the letter (to/from, date, location, number of pages, etc.) as well as a set of images of the reader. The ones I looked at I could not read thanks to both handwriting and fading.

Some of the letters DO have transcripts, also with occasional notes about the letters and content.

The University of Delaware Library Digital Collections has added three new collections to its Web site. All three of the collections relate to the Civil War, and they’re all letter collections.

The Edward A Fulton Collection contains 39 letters, mostly written between Edward Fulton and his mother. The David Lilley Letters consist of 37 letters mostly written between David Lilley and his sister over a four-year span. Finally, the Thomas Reynolds Letters were written to Louisa Seward and include letters, poems, and an invoice for medical equipment (!!)

The collections are presented in a framed page; the list of letters on the left. (There are few enough letters in each collection that this is not unwieldy.) Click a letter and it appears on the right as an scan of the original document. If you want to read a transcript (though I was surprised how easy the originals were to read) use the pull-down menu over the list of letters. Choose “Page & Text” and click Go. You’ll get a pop-up button with the transcript (it took me a few minutes to figure this out.) While browsing the original images you can zoom in, paginate, and get referring URLs.

Nice collections!