From Here to Eternity

The ALCTS President's Program featured the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. The speaker was Dr. Linda Harris Mehr, its director, and the presentation highlighted the library's diverse holdings of film materials.

The library deals with a time frame from pre-cinema to the present and has nearly complete Oscar collections. Materials are in diverse formats and include books, pamphlets, periodicals, including trade, house organs (a type of studio-generated publicity flyer), fan and genre magazines, 10 million photos, color transparencies and slides, advertising materials, biography, film, and subject files, set and costume designs, musical scores and sheet music, postcards, 35,000 posters, personal correspondence, and over 10,000 screenplays.

Dr. Mehr outlined and discussed the issues that her library has to deal with and pointed out that her library's concerns are not unlike those concerns of other libraries. Materials have to be acquired, sometimes without the benefit of adequate funding; materials must be organized and processed; materials in various formats must be stored and preserved; there must be provisions for patron access of the stored materials; staffers must be hired who are talented, skilled, and dedicated.

At closing, we were reminded that the library, housed in Beverly Hills, is open to the public, with core collections readily available, and with provisions to see more specialized collections by appointment. This is a definite must-see for those of you who are film buffs.