The Educational Media Film Collection contains two series: 16mm Films and Digital Copies. All films, whether University of South Dakota, state, national, student, or special productions, are in the 16mm film series. Three 16mm films (The Art of Being Indian, Oscar Howe: Camera Original Footage, and Portrait of a River) were digitized from a private collection and the Archives and Special Collections maintains digital copies only. The 16mm Films series is listed twice: first, as a descriptive list of the films organized alphabetically by title (ignoring the initial articles a, an, the) and secondly, as a list of the films in the order they are stored on the shelf, by reel enclosure size then alphabetically by title (ignoring the initial articles a, an, the) within each size.
The descriptive list of the films includes the following items where they are available: original catalog number assigned by Educational Media, year produced, size of film, film length, black and white or color. Following the descriptions are short narratives originally provided to accompany the films from Educational Media. Indicated next is whether a patron access copy on DVD is available. If the title in the descriptive list is different from the title on the container, that is also indicated.
Many of the films contained within this collection are films produced for or by The University of South Dakota. What Is the University, The University and You, Eternal Search, and Graduate Study are examples of films that provide a historical overview of programs or departments at the university for the years in which they were made.
Included in this film collection are over twenty movies directed, filmed, or in some way owing their creation to Sanford Gray. Sanford Gray was assistant professor of speech and dramatic arts as well as the director of film production at The University of South Dakota from 1960 to 1989.
The second series in this collection contains the Digital Copies of 16mm films. Date digitized, file format, and disk type are listed for each digital copy when the information is known. This series is divided into three subseries:
· Digital copies on DVD (Digital Video Disc) of the 16mm films for patron access. This set of DVD is meant to be viewed.
· Digital copies on DVD (Digital Video Disc) of the 16mm films for backup. This set of DVDs is meant not to be viewed.
· Digital copies on DVD (Digital Video Disc) of the 16mm films for preservation. These are AVI files that will be added to cloud/network storage in the future.
· Digital AVI and MP4 files on network/cloud storage.