View/Open
Date
2011
Degree
MSc Information and Library Management
Publisher
Dublin Business School
Rights
Items in Esource are protected by copyright. Previously published items are made available in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher/copyright holder.
Abstract
In 2005 it was suggested within a New York Times article that perhaps a university level
qualification in film studies could be considered “the new MBA” given the moving image’s
extraordinary capacity for communicating messages on a global scale (Van Ness, 2005). The
increasingly prominent position of films in the academic library from the early ‘90s onwards
has popularly been attributed to the rise of film studies in universities along with advances
in home video technology. Such developments have facilitated the holding of open access
DVD and VHS collections of popular films in the academic library. However the growth of
popular film collections has been contemporaneous with an increasing focus on postmodern
theory and cultural studies in film studies and the decline of the practice of evaluation from
academic film study. In this environment film canons compiled and endorsed by film
academics have disappeared to be replaced by a proliferation of “best of” lists compiled by
popular magazines and websites. This thesis analyses the film collections of seven Irish
university libraries in order to determine whether or not film canons do continue to play a
role in their formation and development.