Just in time for awards season: new additions to Cinema Image Gallery

If your library is planning any activities to tie in with this year's movie awards season, H.W. Wilson is here to help. Cinema Image Gallery is already bursting at the seams with posters, photos, and movie clips, and now we're adding 8,082 new images to the database.

Among the additions are

100 images from Twilight: New Moon

59 from True Blood

60 from Couples Retreat

47 from Avatar

47 from Where the Wild Things Are

47 from Sherlock Holmes

41 from Men Who Stare at Goats

39 from Invictus

39 from Nine

39 from Zombieland

36 from The Informant!

18 from Up In the Air

14 from District 9

 

Admittedly, some of these movies and shows are more award-worthy than others, but that just proves how all-encompassing the database is.

These new additions will be available to subscribers very soon. If you are already a subscriber, look out for them. Images like these are invaluable for patrons doing project work, looking for costume or interior design ideas, or just browsing for fun.

 

If you want to be a subscriber, why not try a free trial?

Presidents Day for Omnifile subscribers

Although Presidents Day was originally designed to pay tribute to George Washington, it has often been expanded in recent years to include other presidents, and some states have officially included Abraham Lincoln in Presidents Day.

An article in Scholastic Update, Teachers' Edition, from January 1998, suggests that alongside Washington and Lincoln, the holiday should honor Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In your library:

Public libraries could run a poll to see which president their local community would like to see alongside Washington and Lincoln in the Presidents Day honor roll. One starting point for this project could be "A Leader From the Start," an article in U.S. News and World Report, June 2009. In this article, the writer discusses five presidents who have had the most far-reaching first 100-day periods in U.S. presidential history.

Elementary school libraries could take ideas from an article in the January-February 2007 edition of Instructor, in which teacher Trina Gunzel describes four of her favorite ideas for students to share what they have learned about Presidents Day.

And for other school libraries, the February 2008 edition of Arts & Activities has an article in which the writer outlines an activity that teaches mainstream and learning-disabled students and adults about the creation of busts throughout art history. The writer points out that holidays like Presidents Day are often over looked by art teachers, when in fact there is a wealth of presidential art material available.

Groundhog Day

Although Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania enjoys one of the country's best-known Groundhog Day celebrations every year, other towns and communities around the nation have also made the day their own.

For example, since 1988, when Lieutenant Governor Bill Nichol officially proclaimed Unadilla the Groundhog Capital of Nebraska, the stuffed groundhog Unadilla Bill has been proferring his annual weather prediction on the main street of that small town, and has become the centerpiece of the Groundhog Festival.

Unadilla's festival usually takes place on the first weekend of February every year.

According to an article in the February/March 2005 edition of National Wildlife, however, the idea that groundhogs, or woodchucks, emerge in early February to check the weather might be incorrect. A biology professor in Pennsylvania has suggested that instead, male groundhogs wake up in February to initiate bonding sessions with potential mates prior to emerging from hibernation completely in March.

The information in this article comes from Omnifile Full Text Select and General Science Full Text. The photo is from Cinema Image Gallery.

Happy birthday Baryshnikov

Russian-American ballet dancer and actor Mikhail Baryshnikov is 62 years old today. Although he started studying ballet at the relatively mature age of 12, Baryshnikov attained high status as a dancer in a short space of time. In his late teens he became a soloist in Russia's acclaimed Kirov Ballet, and was one of its leading dancers by the time he was 20. Unhappy with the restrictions placed upon him by Soviet authorities, however, Baryshnikov defected to the U.S. in 1974, along with other prominent Soviet dancers of this time.

He is widely regarded as the best ballet dancer of his day, is a star choreographer, and has also achieved acclaim as an actor. His leading role in the Broadway play Metamorphosis (1989) earned him a Tony award nomination, and he recently appeared in several episodes of the HBO comedy Sex and the City. 

The content of this post is from Biography Reference Bank, and some of the photos are from Cinema Image Gallery.

Sundance Film Festival

Today marks the start of the 2010 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Now an established part of the independent cinema calendar, there have been doubts about the festival's ability to turn up a box office winner in the past. An article from Variety, January 12-18, 1998, reminds us that

"all of the films picked up during the 1997 festival were commercial disappointments",

and that the only two commercial successes to come out of that year's festival--In the Company of Men and Kiss Me Guido--were picked up after the festival had ended.

By 2009, however, things had certainly turned around. According to an American Cinematographer article in April, last year's festival turned up such critical and audience favorites as Sin Nombre, directed by Adriano Goldman; An Education, directed by Lone Scherfig; and Push (now Precious): Based on the Novel by Sapphire, directed by Lee Daniels.

Articles come from Omnifile Full Text, Mega Edition and photos from Cinema Image Gallery.

ALA Midwinters Past

To commemorate the ALA Midwinter Conference in Boston this weekend, we took a look through our databases to see how library journals have covered the event in the past.

An article cited in ERIC reminds us that in 1981 the technologies under discussion were

"microcomputers, videodiscs, and other forms of the newer technologies in school library media centers."

Twenty years later, Midwinter 2001 began to address an issue now familiar to librarians: how to position libraries as the information providers of choice when the Internet appears to offer so much. According to the symposium "Building the Virtual Reference Desk in a 24/7 World,"

"libraries must adapt traditional strengths of acquiring, describing, and serving information to an environment that is not bound by time or physical place, the virtual library without walls."

Now, in 2010, we can see that libraries and companies in the library sector have responded to this challenge with enthusiasm and inventiveness. Library patrons can now text a librarian, and will soon be able to tweet a librarian when they have a query.

Our own services have expanded to include a search widget that librarians and patrons can embed in their own Facebook pages, bringing the social networking and research worlds even closer together.

So why not make this Midwinter doubly social and twice as networked? If you don't already have a Twitter account, sign up for one now and follow conference news at #alamw10.

You can even follow us at HWWilsonCo.

Cinema Image Gallery makes the Booklist list of best reference sources, 2009

According to Booklist's review,

"Researchers and fans wanting access to more than 152,000 high-quality film stills and related images copyright-cleared for educational use—as well as linked biographies and articles on actors, directors, films, and related topics—could do no better than Cinema Image Gallery."

You can read the full list on the Booklist website. It's a highly impressive list of resources. Cinema Image Gallery is in excellent company.