Historical Data Recovery and Conversion for Indiana University

Funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Film Literature Index has been published since 1973 by the Film and Television Documentation Center (FATDOC).

Challenge Rescuing Six Years of Unusable Data

Indiana University partnered with FATDOC to convert the index from print format to an accessible online database. Before the conversion project began, Indiana University discovered that six years of legacy electronic data was lost or unusable, threatening the project’s completion on time and on budget.

Solution Conversion of Film Literature Index into a Usable XML Format

Indiana University turned to Aptara for its ability to rapidly transform static data into dynamic digital content. A highly-skilled technical workforce and state-of-the-art integrated production facilities uniquely enabled Aptara to solve Indiana University’s acute data crisis.

• Six years of missing data was recovered, resulting in 6,311 pages and yielding more than 45 megabytes of data.
• The new data was quickly and efficiently converted in accordance with the TEIxLite DTD.
• In addition to the typical bibliographic information, the converted files contained fields associated with film and television production headings, such as media, production location, director, etc.

Results The Complete Film Literature Index Available Online

• A complete, fully-searchable, Web-based version of the most significant reference work for film and television studies.
• Hundreds of film and television periodicals from 30 countries indexed from cover to cover.
• Many more individual articles on film and television were also indexed.