eReviews: Television Literature Index with Full Text (FTLIFT)

BSCO, www.ebscohost.com

Film & Television Literature Index with Full Text (FTLIFT) is a bibliographic and full-text database covering subjects in film and television theory, preservation, restoration, writing, production, cinematography, technology, and reviews. The database contains cover-to-cover indexing and abstracts for over 300 publications, with full text for 90-plus journals and approximately 60 books, and is updated continuously.

HOW DOES IT WORK? The main screen of FTLIFT works much the same as other files in EBSCOhost 2.0: you can use Basic Search, Advanced Search, or Visual Search, and users have options for different Search Modes (Boolean/Phrase, Find all my search terms, Find any of my search terms, and SmartText Searching). They may also limit searches to full text only, by publication, by publication type, by date (from 1961 to 2008), to peer-reviewed material, by language, by document type, and to cover stories only—these are obviously significantly helpful limiters for this database. At screen top are buttons for the list of Publications in the file and to Cited References, as well as a link to Variety Movie Reviews (more on this later).

CAN YOU USE IT? Let me state up front that I've been waiting for this product practically all my life; it's about as important in my world as the invention of the videotape player. I'll try to toe the line to detached reviewing, but the content sends my pulse racing with every search. Ahem. To the review.

I first tried a Basic Search for "bringing up baby," and that netted me 55 hits, including an Entertainment Weekly review of Knocked Up (not what I was looking for at all). So I next tried an Advanced Search for "bringing up baby" as a Subject, and got five results, one of which, "Magical Movie Ad-Libs," by Wes Gehring in USA Today Magazine, included the full text of the article in HTML and PDF. Ten minutes ensued in which I read the article, learning that in Bringing Up Baby Katherine Hepburn improvised the whole scene at the creek when she loses her heel and says to Cary Grant, "I was born on the side of a hill." I also discovered that Bert Lahr improvised "Unusual weather we're having, isn't it?" in the poppy field scene of The Wizard of Oz. FTLIFT is chock-full of articles like these, so my review was slowed down (literally) by three days.

For a change of pace, I next clicked on the Variety Movie Reviews button at screen top, and went to a Search box for movie names. I entered "mamma mia," which came up in the alphabetical browse list, and when I selected that entry, I got the full text of two reviews: the first for Mamma Mia! the movie, the second for Mamma Mia! the theatrical production performed at the Royal Alexandra Theater, Toronto, Ontario, on May 23, 2000. So there's more under that button than just movie reviews.

Then I tried a Visual Search for "get smart." I got a bunch of interesting, pertinent results (the screen didn't tell me how many results I got—it just lined them up by subject: "Get Smart-Film," "Get Smart-TV Program," etc.), including the PDF full text of the June 1966 Saturday Evening Post article "Would You Believe Don Adams?" And had I wanted to, I could have bookmarked and shared the article to any of 34 different services, including Del.icio.us, Facebook, and MySpace (yep, welcome to EBSCO 2.0!).

So far, so good. Now for some serious film cineaste exploring. My search for "un chien andalou" (the 1928 film by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí) as a Subject found four results from such publications as The New Yorker, the Village Voice, and the New Republic (the latter an article by Stanley Kauffmann). No full text, but interesting article citations. My search for "leni riefenstahl" got four results, from the New York Times, the New Republic, Artforum International, and Kinostsenarii. The 1994 review by Kauffmann in the New Republic of the documentary film The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl is available in the file in full text.

A search for "norman mclaren" found 139 hits, many of which weren't relevant. When I searched for Mr. McLaren as a subject, I got nada, however. So next I tried modifying my search for the name in all text with the word "canada" (since McLaren did so much work for the National Film Board of Canada) and got 30 solid results, 19 of which included the full text—remarkable.

I next did some cross-checking on the contents of FTLIFT as compared with what's found in general purpose databases and saw that there is some duplication of content. However, no other single database pulls all the relevant visual studies material together as does this one, and none offers the pertinent full text to film and television researchers like FTLIFT does.

WHAT'S THE COST? Subscriptions for individual institutions range from $1650 to $9900, based on FTE and existing EBSCO subscriptions.

HOW GOOD IS IT? For content, delivery, and value, this file rates a ten, definitely. BOTTOM LINE An essential addition to library collections supporting film, television, visual arts studies, and cultural studies. This resource will also be extraordinarily useful in medium and large public libraries and in school libraries supporting visual arts programs.