CBC News has noted a new site from Hot Docs, which it describes as “the largest documentary festival in North America.” The new Hot Docs site has well over 150 documentaries from Canadian filmmakers (along with some other content) and it’s all available online for free. The site is available at http://hotdocslibrary.ca/en/ (that’s the English, non-Flash version.)
The front page has several sets of films you can go through — films by young filmmakers, films for educators, the most popular films — but I went straight to the browse tab and started poking around. The browse page is at http://hotdocslibrary.ca/en/browse.cfm. The documentaries are listed by title though they’re also sortable by year and by director. (The oldest dated documentary in the database was from 1951.)
The first doc in alphabetical order is $4 Haircut, a 6-minute short (with a groovy oompa tuba soundtrack) about a guy who, well, gets $4 haircuts. It shows his methodology and experience and while you might not expect a short featuring mostly a guy sitting around waiting to get a haircut to be interesting, it was. The documentary is embedded in the page with the usual volume control, pop-out to full screen, etc. The page also contains a summary of information about the documentary (director, producer, editor, etc.) In this case, the documentary also had extras, specifically transcripts in English and French.
I browsed through the shorts and found a number of topics — one film was about ginsing. Another featured Geddy Lee. A third was about Thomas Edison and sound reproduction in technology. They ranged from under ten minutes to around fifteen to 32 minutes in the case of the Edison documentary.
The videos loaded really quickly, there was a wide range of content, and it was all free. If you’re at all interested in documentaries check out this site.
The University of Alberta Libraries now has a collection of postcards available from the Peel’s Prairie Provinces web site (the site focuses on the history of western Canada and the Canadian prairies.) The postcards launched the week of December 14 and are available at http://peel.library.ualberta.ca/browse/postcards/.
The over 15,000 postcards here are divided into a dozen categories, including People, Events, Business, Organizations, and Vehicles. Click on a category and you’ll get a pop-up window that allows you to go even further, browsing sub- and sub-sub-categories. (I clicked on Objects and ended up browsing Fire Hydrants.)
Because you can browse so specifically you might not see many postcards on the page you get. My Fire Hydrants result gave me one result, a 1910 postcard of a train station (the hydrant is in the foreground.) Click on the thumbnail of the postcard in the results page and you’ll get a larger image as well as expected details about the card (physical description, notes about the subject of the card) and unexpected (address on the card! Message on the card! This information wasn’t always available but what a surprise when it was!)
You can also do a keyword search; a search for snow found over 500 results, including the young man on the left playing cowboy out in the snow, circa 1917.
Results are presented 48 to a page with thumbnails and brief descriptions, with thumbs leading to a detail page. Images could be a bit bigger but they’re good enough; the scans are high-res and you can download them if you want to enlarge them and look at them more closely.
As long as you’re here, jump up a level and visit Peel’s Prairie Provinces, which contains digitized newspapers (French and English) and business/residence directories, among other offerings. The newspaper holdings in particular are very extensive.
The city of Edmonton, capital of the Canadian province of Alberta, now has more than 25,000 historic photos available on its city Web site. The direct URL is https://archivesphotos.edmonton.ca/Presto/Default.aspx.
To get a sense of what’s here you can check out the top 200 most requested photos. There are some weird ones in this collection, including “Woman Demonstrating Oven Capacity” (um, what?) and “Sad Santa”. Pictures have slightly larger versions and a few details like year taken, but not a lot.
If you don’t like the top 200 photos you can also search by keyword. You can browse too if you like, but since all the images are in the “uncategorized” collection, browsing won’t do you much good. A search for “train” found me over 170 images, including some really nice shots of locomotives from the early 20th century. Be sure to keep your searches general; “train” found me that many images but “locomotive” found me only two, and I know there were more.
I like how eclectic and wide-ranging this collection is. If you like any of the prints here you can order them for $20 each except for the panoramas. They have a different price structure.
