Blue Devil Notebook: New life for old educational films

When professor Lana Jordan began teaching physics at Merced College 22 years ago, she inherited a large collection of educational films that have instructional and historical value.

The films were originally produced by the Physical Science Study Committee, a group of MIT scientists who wanted to develop a teaching course and a series of films for physical science teachers across the nation.

Since the early 1990s, Jordan has shown the 16 mm reel-to-reel films to hundreds of students. However, those films, produced from 1959-61, have become increasingly fragile and have begun deteriorating. Jordan knew that she had to find a way to preserve the films for future generations of students.

“My goal was always to preserve them in a permanent form,” she said. “However, the technology wasn’t what we have today and the expense was always prohibitive.”

Jordan, who has maintained the only 16 mm film projector on campus, and her students used a temporary solution that found them videotaping the films while they played on a projector. That project proved unsatisfactory.

“It was possible to digitize the films 20 years ago, but the estimate was $35,000, which made that idea impossible,” she said.

Then, a few years ago, Jordan came across a nonprofit film preservation company that could digitize the films, as well as store the originals in a climate-ontrolled environment, at a cost of $4,500.

That’s when she approached the Merced College Foundation for a grant to complete the project.

“The foundation thought that her proposal was worthy of support as the film archive needed to be preserved,” said Robin Shepard, the foundation’s executive director. “The bonus was that the films could be uploaded for use by any physics teacher around the world. We realized that the project would have a large impact globally.”

According to Geoff Alexander, director of the San Jose-based nonprofit Academic Film Archive of North America, the film collection is truly rare.

“Most media libraries in the country have divested themselves of 16 mm film, and to my knowledge, PSSC films were never released on DVD,” Alexander said. “Some, but not all, may have been released on VHS, but media libraries have, for the most part, gotten rid of their VHS tapes as well.

“The grant that professor Jordan received makes more than 20 of these films available free of charge for the first time to scholars, teachers, students and the general public via the Internet.”

Alexander noted that these historical films include many of the leading physicists of that time and can be used today in physics classrooms all over the world.

“At the AFA, we’ve uploaded more than 300 films to our collection at the Internet archive, and one of the PSSC films, ‘Frames of Reference,’ has been downloaded more than all of them – 79,500 times as of now.”

Jordan explained the significance of the film series: “I’ve been told that we had the finest and best preserved collection of the PSSC films anywhere. These scientists were brilliant, many of them having worked in labs during (World War II). They were on the leading edge of physical science in the ’50s, and their work, which was demonstrated in these nuts and bolts experiments that they captured on film, is still relevant today.”

According to the AFA website, “The mission of The Academic Film Archive of North America is to acquire, preserve, document, and promote academic film by providing an archive, resource and forum for continuing scholarly advancement and public exhibition.”

“We’re the only institution in the U.S. dedicated to documenting the history of this endangered film genre,” Alexander said, noting that AFA also documents and archives historically important films not specifically in the academic genre, including anthropological, ethnographic and medical subjects.

This story was originally published June 19, 2015 at 3:59 PM with the headline "Blue Devil Notebook: New life for old educational films."