Alexander Street Press's March of Time provides streaming access to the newsreel series of the same name from Time, Inc., featuring titles originally screened in movie theatres from 1935 to 1951, those from The March of Time on Television series that ran until 1967, and special topic-specific series, such as “Ballets de France” and “Crusade in the Pacific”. The current release includes 434 titles. All of the films have been digitally restored by HBO Archives.
These works are highly valuable to both media studies and history disciplines. Methodologically, the producers interspersed documentary footage with actor-portrayed recreations of key scenes never caught on film, controversially altering the newsreel genre. Professional and amateur actors were employed and key historical figures occasionally portrayed themselves. For example, the 1946 film Atomic Power featured scenes with J. Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein (Fielding, n.d.).
Some topics were controversial as well, lending Time's editorial perspective to important issues of the day. For example, 1938's Inside Nazi Germany, filmed in Hoboken, NJ, provided an anti-isolationist view of Hitler's Germany at a time when American policy leaned solidly in the opposite direction (Genzlinger, 2010). Along with political and military topics, coverage includes the arts, industry, religion, etc., providing insight about American attitudes and daily life during four turbulent decades.
The interface will be familiar to users of other Alexander Street Press products. Under a narrow title banner, a main navigation ribbon appears, with a basic search box on the right. Navigation options include Browse, Advanced Search, Playlists (user-generated collections combining content from the database with internet links to other relevant materials), What's New, and Help. Beneath this ribbon, the screen serves as a vast canvas for content. Navigation is clear and text highly readable throughout the interface.
The Home screen and the viewing screen are quite attractive. The home screen features a brief description of the product, with four thumbnail slideshows just below providing one-click access to the content represented. There is a left-column navigation with browse options and links to holdings related to some of the primary historical events covered in the collection. The viewing screen features a brief citation, with a plus sign button signifying “add to a playlist”, and a mobile phone icon providing functionality to “send to mobile device”. The film automatically loads into a player that takes up the left half of the screen, with the right taken up by a transcript viewer. Enlarging the player changes the ratio of player to viewer to about 2:1. A Sync option, selected by default, allows the user to follow along in the transcript as highlighting automatically keeps pace with narration or dialogue. A button launches the Make Clips functionality where a user provides start and stop time signatures, a title and optional notes, and then determines who can access the clip: the user alone, anyone at the user's institution, or anyone in the world with subscription access.
All Videos, available from the Browse menu, leads to a results table organized alphabetically by title and sortable by type, series, or era. For each entry there is a play button, which opens the film in the viewing screen, along with the add-to-playlist and send-to-mobile buttons. Also a browse option, the Clips link provides tabbed access to Featured Clips, User Submitted Clips, and My Clips. Timeline presents a list for drilling down, from decade, to year, to a list of titles. All other browse options lead to a single page with a tab each for subjects, eras, years, events, people, and places. Each item listed features a thumbnail, with options to play, add to playlist, and send to mobile. There are few means for filtering the results, for example by era or language. Results screens are predicated on function over form; options are clear and information highly readable, but the design is not particularly attractive.
The system's advanced search presents a series of query boxes, each for searching within a specified field. Select Terms links next to each open checklists of valid search terms. Use of truncation is supported. There are no Boolean options explicitly presented, although the help files cover how to do this manually. Intermediate and expert searchers will like the balance of functionality with clear design; novices accustomed to the flexibility of internet search may struggle with the lack of keyword, anywhere, or any field options. Users can print results or generate a search URL.
The interface is quite fast, especially considering the streaming quality. It takes less than 15 seconds – rarely more than ten – for the opening image of a film to appear in the player, and playback begins less than three seconds after the play button is pressed. There is one manoeuvre that seems to throw the system for a loop: if a user clicks on the enlarge button during the five-fifteen seconds before the opening still image appears, the image never appears and the play button does not function at all. Using the browser's back button to get back to the referring webpage seems to reset the system with no lingering problems.
Help files are clear and thorough, but somewhat daunting, consisting of more than 30 exhaustive pages organized into six categories. Much of what falls under the Getting Started category seems directed at intermediate or expert users and there seems to be very little of immediate value for users having difficulty navigating the system. Clicking on Navigation under Getting Started provides only a terse few sentences describing how to work with a results list. Brief FAQs provide cursory information about a limited number of topics, and navigation is not covered. Technical support contact information is made readily available on each help page.
Users are able to generate stable URLs for videos, clips, playlists, and searches, as well as code for embedding videos. When clicked, these trigger an authentication process and content is viewable by authorized users only. Performance rights allow for streaming in an educational context. Licensees cannot download content, screen content to the general public, or publish it in a non-secure venue.
Alexander Street Press is the biggest player in the subscription newsreel database business. Their American History in Video (RR 2010/095) includes early newsreels from United and Universal, and their World Newsreels Online includes The March of Time and the United and Universal films, along with titles from Japan, France, and Holland. One competing subscription product is Newsfilm Online (www.jisc-content.ac.uk/node/18), which includes newsreels from the early twentieth century and comes bundled into the JISC Mediahub. Almanac Newsreel provides subscription access to brief clips edited from Hearst Metronome newsreels. British Pathé makes nearly 35,000 titles available by subscription to UK institutions. Freely available sources include the growing collection of Universal Studios newsreels available through the Internet Archive, and Fox Movietone News: The War Years from the University of South Carolina (USC) Libraries.
These products each provide roughly equivalent coverage to The March of Time, but differ in key ways. Newsfilm Online and British Pathé have a European focus, while Almanac Newsreel, the Internet Archive collection, and the Fox Movietone collection, like The March of Time, feature American films. While the Pathé collection is by far the largest of the available products, it is available for subscription in the UK only. The USC collection is mainly limited to topics from the Second World War era. Almanac provides only brief clips, edited and compiled for the K-12 audience.
There are a few reasons for investing in The March of Time, when all of these free and subscription alternatives are available. First, these films are streamed at a consistent high quality, in contrast to some of the other products. Alexander Street Press is a long time player in the market, providing the organization and manpower to support customers and users. The March of Time interface, while not necessarily attractive, is highly functional, particularly once users have moved from novice to intermediate level of expertise. Finally, covering a range of issues of importance to the American people across four decades, illustrates the editorial stance of a major media empire of the era, and depicts not only events caught on film but also dramatic recreations of scenes deemed significant upon reflection. The unique content of The March of Time provides a unique body of work of interest to historians, media scholars, and educators alike.
