Film and television studies – what is now increasing known under the umbrella term “screen studies” – have long suffered from the lack of online indexing resources. Often researchers have had to rely upon other humanities databases or general aggregator databases to research topics such as French New Wave cinema or the films of Scorsese and Eisenstein and use print sources such as the Film Literature Index, first published in 1973 by the Film and Television Documentation Center at the State University of New York (SUNY), or the index of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF), the International Index to Film/TV Periodicals, which began in 1979. At the time of writing Proquest's Chadwyck‐Healey unit is developing the FIAF index and some other film research tools into a large, but somewhat pricey subscription package with selective full‐text coverage. But libraries also have a free alternative: the Film Literature Index Online (FLI Online) produced by Indiana University Digital Library Program. Indiana University has digitized over 700,000 citations to articles and reviews from the SUNY print index and currently provides free electronic access to it from 1976 to 2001. It indexes over 150 film and television trade periodicals and peer‐reviewed journals raging from Variety to the Journal of Popular Film and Television, and even major non‐English‐language publications such as Cahiers du Cinéma. Although there is no associated full text, the FLI Online is a fast, well‐constructed, and very user‐friendly database that greatly facilitates screen studies research without adding lines to the already overtaxed budgets of academic and public libraries.
The design of the search interface is one of the most impressive aspects of this database; indeed, it rivals many subscription databases in the features it offers and options it gives. There are helpful search tips provided on the right‐hand side of the search screens explaining the search functions such as Boolean operators, phrase searching, wildcard/stemming, and unique options such as the ability to search for a person (director, actor, or critic/author) or to search by production title. The basic search mode has a single search box with radio buttons allowing the user to search by keyword, production, or person. The advanced search page has additional free‐text boxes with drop‐down menus to search by keyword, production title, person (author), person (subject), article title, journal title, subject (using its controlled vocabulary), and corporate name (to search by studio), production company, distributor, or other entertainment industry business. There are filters for date, format, document type, document features (such an obituary or interview), language, and peer‐reviewed journals. Users can choose to display 20, 30, or 50 results per page. The third search mode is a browse search of subject headings – their virtual thesaurus – or personal names, production titles, or corporate names.
Results appear as full citations in MLA Style, and the full record view gives the subject headings (hyperlinked), tells whether the article is peer‐reviewed, and lists production information if it is an article or review of a film or television programme. Results can be marked to be printed/edited/saved, and saved results can be exported to EndNote. There are some minor limitations in the database software that affect searchability. For example, users must enter the journal title Sight & Sound with the ampersand since the string “sight and sound” in the journal title field yields no results. Results for the keyword “color” and “colour” are not linked, so users need to insert a wildcard symbol (*) in order to include both American and British/Commonwealth spellings in their search.
Because it is citation‐only, this database will not appeal to all users. The Proquest FIAF database, when it is completed, will offer a more full‐text content that will dovetail well with content of the Indiana database, and would be a good supplement for those institutions able to afford it. But having even just the citations to 25 years' worth of international film and television scholarship and criticism pooled into a single, free electronic database makes FLI Online a resource that any library supporting screen studies or maintaining popular collections in film and television will want to add to its list of online resources.
