Resource Rabbit Hole! (Blogging Every Day #8)

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If you haven't discovered the treasure trove of public domain material available through the British Library, check it out - over a million images of all kinds from the 17th, 18th and  19th centuries, available for anyone to use or adapt. Here's an article about this resource, and here's a link to the Flickr photostream where it resides.   It's a great place to find direct resources - or just inspiration. Some images are obscure, while others will seem quite familiar. This collection currently features images from just 46,000 books, from a collection of over 14 million - with more to come.  

Just don't fall down the rabbit hole!

The first two images are from a book identified as "Sedbergh School Songs. Written and illustrated by R. St. J. Ainslie," published in 1896. A quick Google search found that Sedbergh School, founded in 1525, is still very much in business.

The rabbit image is from a book identified as "The Bashful Earthquake, and other fables and verses ... With many pictures by the author," published in 1899. It's been scanned and it available in it's entirety at the Internet Archive.

The image below is identified as "A Little Tour in Ireland. By an Oxonian, S. R. Hole ... With illustrations by J. Leech ... New edition," published in 1892. It's actually available at Amazon.

I can give you a million more examples, but you get the idea...

Your Vlogging Legacy

One hundred and eight years ago, the first member of my grandmother's family came to America, thanks to the sponsorship of another family that preceded ours.   Though they were always considered family to the generations that followed, the true nature of the association - how we were related - was lost in the past.  Recent DNA testing finally proved that we were, indeed, cousins - a relationship that likely originated in 19th century Russia.    We recently had a reunion with members of that family - individuals whom we'd never met, but whose families had a pivotal role in our own history.  

The search to find that distant common ground - one of the key attractions to exploring one's genealogy - takes on new meaning in the age of online video.

When I started my "Vlogger Interview" project on YouTube, my intention was to seek out a better understanding of this powerful and rapidly changing means of expression.  As I talk to more and more vloggers, I've realized that preserving our collective history is an important part of the process. 

Vlogger Andy Gunton  (Andymooseman on YouTube) has recorded over 700 vlogs over the past several years on a wide variety of topics ranging from history to politics to music.  He made an important point in his vlogger interview that in creating those videos, he's also creating a legacy - a time capsule of sorts - of who he is, what he believes - essentially, a gift to his descendants. 

We're recording and preserving our personal history as never before.   As time moves on, and our era is consigned to the (digital) history books, future historians and genealogists will have direct access to, as  Richard Reyonlds (BusterSenshi, another interview subject) puts it, the Zeitgeist of modern society.   In an upcoming interview, ErikTV365 is driven to post a vlog every day of his life - sharing his family's daily adventures - and expressing an appreciation of his own life as a cancer survivor - preserving his family history, but also, his very nature.  By simply pursing his hobbies and interests through his social media channels, teen vlogger Harrison Houde (xTurnipTimex - here's his interview) will one day be able to recall aspects of his own coming of age more directly than any previous generation.

Traces of family members from generations past won't disappear as thoughts, ideas, friendships, conflicts and opinions will preserve part of their essence.   We'll have the opportunity (or curse?) to learn more about ourselves from our ancestors - or even our younger selves.

What will your distant descendants perceive of you from your social media - your Facebook posts, your tweets, your vlogs, your photos - and your YouTube videos - and of the media you post publicly on a regular basis?  

Is it you?

Movie Moguls and YouTube Subversives

I recently finished watching TCM's seven part documentary, "Moguls and Movie Stars: A History of Hollywood," which traces the history of the film industry from its earliest days all the way up to the final fade out of the mogul era in the late 1960's.

While it didn't really cover any new ground, it did provide a great overall look at the evolution of the industry, and the unique personalities that built the early industry.  These pioneers - from Louis B. Mayer to the Warner Brothers, to Darryl Zanuck - not only invented (and continuously reinvented) the movie industry, but achieved success with pure tenacity.  That may sound somewhat cliche these days, but these guys (and women, the program illustrates) really did it.

For me, the most fascinating part of the program is the earliest episode, "Peepshow Pioneers"which looks at the industry in its very earliest days, from 1889 - 1907, when peepshows - those machines that individuals would peer into to view 10 or 20 second short films - became the craze.  The program reports that Thomas Edison's  studio (really, the first of its kind) produced close to a thousand of these short films in a single year.  In the beginning, these films consisted primarily of simple improvisational skits created by Edison's studio workers themselves.

I can't help think of parallels to the social media / YouTube world today, where so many are experimenting with a form of expression which is both an evolution of motion pictures, and it's own unique creation.  Of course, in those early days, a single man, Thomas Edison, who invented (or perfected) much of the technology that made the birth of the industry possible, and tried to hold onto a monopoly in the creation and distribution of content.  Today, media creation is open to all, and there are limitless variations on creating YouTube content - some for nothing more than self-expression, and others as entrepreneurial ventures.

The film industry wasn't invented by individuals from the theater world - it was created by people from unrelated worlds - or dirt poor kids  -  who created an opportunity that others may have ignored in their own sophistication.   If the social media platform does evolve, the driving forces that make it stand on its own will not, ultimately come from the existing media industries - but from the individuals who are creating audiences where none existed.

I suspect that most, if not all of the top YouTubers are individuals without filmmaking backgrounds.  Even though I'm a filmmaker, I love the subversive irony...