Cinema Ireland
CD-Rom (Mac/PC)
£20
UNDER the giant glass pyramid beside the Louvre, the bookshop isn't just about books. Nowadays it has row upon row of CD-Roms (or "Cede Roms", as the French sometimes call them). So, too does the multimedia department of Virgin's megastore next door. They have disks about artists, about galleries including the Louvre itself, about art collections, and digital versions of history and reference works.
In Ireland, by comparison, our galleries and libraries have been much slower on the uptake. So a welcome sign that things are changing is a new CD Rom about Irish films and film makers, just published by the National Library. Compiled by cameraman, producer and director Robert Monks, it's yet another indication of how far our film culture has advanced, with record cinema attendances and a thriving infrastructure, including the Irish Film Centre and a national archive built from virtually nothing within little more than a decade.
The new CD Rom, Cinema Ireland, is based on a database of some 1,600 Irish related films. It draws on many sources including the late Liam O'Leary's legendary archive (now in the National Library), and the work of the Irish Film Archive and the National Archives.
Even given that the CD Rom is to be complemented by a book by Monks, "with a wealth of other information that would not easily sit within the structure of a database", the disk on its own seems relatively sparse. The interface, by Dublin multimedia firm X Communications, is clear and relatively uncluttered, with two main options to "browse" generally through the database or to do a specific search.
It's possible to do searches by:
. film title;
. director;
. year;
. film type (feature, short fiction, animation etc);
. production company;
. country;
. film stock (e.g. colour/silent/
. leading artist(s);
. crew members (camera, editor, music, narration writer, script and sound).
The package seems to be aimed at scholarly users - film students and historians rather than the more general audiences of more "mainstream" educational/reference titles such as Microsoft's best selling Cinemania series or Corel's All Movie Guide.
In fact, for such a visual medium it has no film clips whatsoever, no sound clips either, no extra essays or reviews, or even still pictures (apart from the opening screen).
In other word's, this is almost a text only database, and a relatively small one at that. Despite coming on a CD Rom, the actual application program - containing all the database's data - comes to only 1,642 K, and could easily have been compressed onto one single floppy disk. It's a "serious" research tool, stripped of almost all frills (including cut and paste facilities, though at least there's a Print button).
Which makes its most serious teething problem so surprising: the search engine is achingly, depressingly, frustratingly slow.
As a project looking to the past, it seems it will only work properly on the machines of the future. On an average desktop such as a Mac Performa 630 with 16 megs of memory, we found it took 2 1/2 minutes just to boot up the program, and a further 4 1/2 minutes or more to do a simple query (for example, to find its listing about The Quiet Man). Things improved only slightly on more high end machines we tried it on, such as a brand new Power Mac. This makes the query function a major disappointment.
As for the quality of the information, there are still many gaps, not just for minor newsreels or almost forgotten documentaries. Take the Quiet Man example again - surely the most famous film ever made in Ireland. While the disk gives its leading artists, it has "no details available" for the rest of the crew. It doesn't know about Winton Hoch and Archie Stout (the duo won an Oscar for the film's photography) or the composer Victor Young (an Academy Award nominee). Yet this isn't exactly obscure information - most standard movie and video guides give these credits.
The disk's scope, covering 1896 to 1986, also misses out on the recent renaissance in the industry, but as historians will tell you, history always takes time - particularly history which takes so much research.
Maybe the disk itself will take a lot more time to evolve. This should really be seen as just the first edition of many, one which will expand and improve over years, distilling ever more knowledge and filling in the gaps, adding true multimedia elements, and giving its results in split seconds (rather than several minutes).
Then it will become the valuable, essential research and learning tool it so obviously deserves to be.