About

16mm Filmography is a proof-of-concept database of films released on the 16mm format. It currently catalogs 419,056 records — copyright catalog entries, shot lists, and free-text descriptions imported from the original WordPress site.

Structured fields (year, creator, duration, format, color, sound, copyright registration) are best-effort extractions from each record's free-text content. They will be replaced with cleaner data as it becomes available.

16mmfilmography.org is an attempt to list every film ever released on the 16mm film format. We are doing this to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the film format. This is what we hope to accomplish with this site:

• List every film ever released on the format. We’ll be pulling data from a variety of sources – The Library of Congress Motion Picture Catalogs of Copyrights, various Union Catalogs, trade journals and indexes, etc.
• Allow for institutional archives, collectors, etc to list their holdings. Ideally this will allow us to determine what films exist and who has them. Also, hopefully, we can determine which titles are rare and which are not – in case a collector or archive needs to cull their collection.
• Allow for institutions and collectors to create want lists. This could allow for archives/collectors who are looking to cull their collection to find appropriate homes for the films.
• List the condition of the films that exist.
• Link or embed to films that have been digitized.
• Link to scholarly work about the films for research purposes.
• Create a community of 16mm film enthusiasts to help add, edit and maintain the database.

Right now, we just migrated from WordPress as the backend for the data to a web app and the site is being maintained by A/V Geeks. At some point, when this project takes off, we hope to have a non-profit entity that will actively maintain the site.

We would love your feedback

Skip Elsheimer A/V Geeks avgeeks@gmail.com