Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/834282
6 P E R S P E C T I V E | J U LY / AU G U S T 2 0 1 7 editorial THE THIN AND TWISTY INTERNET by Michael Baugh, Editor Judy Becker argues persuasively in her article in this issue (FEUD: Bette and Joan, page 72) that "experienced designers know the best research materials are not online. You have to dig deeper. I often hire a professional researcher, Damani Mangum, who does considerable legwork. He goes to libraries, contacts archivists, reaches out to as many people as possible who were connected to the real people in the story. This kind of research is invaluable, and it's really very old school, the way period films were researched in earlier days. Most of the really good material has not been digitized, and I think the problem with assuming you can find so much online is that you're left with a really limited amount of reference." Can films —whether period, contemporary or fantasy—be researched from online sources? Sure. Can they be well researched using only the internet? Not a chance. There are lots of reasons for this, but three stand out: searchability, resolution and access. Production Design usually requires knowledge of a particular place in a particular time, and most online images are woefully weak when it comes to that specificity. Relevance-ranked searching weights those areas that are important to the site owner, not to you the user. You can search for 1939 Russian submarines, and the first images that will float to the top of your search engine are likely to be nuclear vessels from the 1990s, American boats or Russian surface ships. More distressingly, many of these images will not really identify what you are looking at. They won't tell you if what you found is correct or not. More importantly, those serendipitous moments when other images in a book or clipping file reveal subjects you hadn't even thought of asking for are few and far between in internet searches which are distressingly literal. Resolution is another difficulty with much online research. Images are placed on websites, even those specifically targeted to image searches, at a resolution that keeps file sizes and bandwidth at a minimum, to increase speed of access and to limit cost. Consequently, most images you might find are too small to allow you to make out the details you need to reproduce the elements accurately. Access is also severely limited on the internet as most repositories don't have the money, manpower or time to post more than a tiny sample of their holdings online. Even those for-profit collections that are able to upload more are only available with a subscription that is often beyond anything but the most lavish of Art Department budgets. Thomas Mann, the Library of Congress reference librarian, writes: "...bricks-and-mortar research libraries contain vast ranges of printed books, copyrighted materials, and site-licensed subscription databases that are not accessible from anywhere, at anytime, by anybody on the Web. Moreover, many of these same resources allow avenues of subject access that cannot be matched by relevance-ranked keyword searching. One can reasonably say that libraries today routinely encompass the entire Internet—that is, they provide terminals that allow access to all of the open portions of the Internet— but that the Internet does not, and cannot, contain more than a small fraction of everything discoverable within library walls." (1) The internet is just one lane to travel to find research, and it's a pretty thin and twisty one. (1) Thomas Mann, THE OXFORD GUIDE TO LIBRARY RESEARCH: HOW TO FIND RELIABLE INFORMATION ONLINE AND OFFLINE, 3d ed (Oxford University Press, 2005), xiii.