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For decades, Lillian Michelson performed research in support of Hollywood film producers, directors, designers, and other creatives.
With material she gathered in the course of her work, in 1969 she began the Cinema Research Library that now bears her name.
A new chapter in the vast collection has begun with Michelson’s donation of the material to the Internet Archive. On 27 January 2021, a virtual ribbon cutting marked the handover of the material. Lillian Michelson, now in her 90s, unveiled the first tranche of the collection’s digitization, housed on the Internet Archives’ digital platform, archive.org.
More of the collection — as much as it is possible to digitize — will be added gradually, and will be free for anyone to use, enthusiasts as well as designers, filmmakers, and researchers in search of information and visual inspiration. “It will be open to everybody,” Michelson said.
With material she gathered in the course of her work, in 1969 she began the Cinema Research Library that now bears her name.
A new chapter in the vast collection has begun with Michelson’s donation of the material to the Internet Archive. On 27 January 2021, a virtual ribbon cutting marked the handover of the material. Lillian Michelson, now in her 90s, unveiled the first tranche of the collection’s digitization, housed on the Internet Archives’ digital platform, archive.org.
More of the collection — as much as it is possible to digitize — will be added gradually, and will be free for anyone to use, enthusiasts as well as designers, filmmakers, and researchers in search of information and visual inspiration. “It will be open to everybody,” Michelson said.
The renowned collection runs to 5,000 books dating back to the 1800s, as well as periodicals, more than 30,000 photographs (architectural, set decoration, prop, and set stills), more than one million clips in clipping files, scrapbooks, set drafts, production notebooks, and other ephemera. In all, the material filled two 18-wheel tractor trailers with 1600 boxes on 45 pallets for the move to the Internet Archives’ facility in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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