Hundreds of titles from our extensive collections have been digitized and are available to watch online for free, thanks to IU Libraries' Media Collections Online. 

More are being digitized all the time, and as copyright allows will be made available online.

Watch a digitized film or video from the IULMIA collections, or view online exhibits featuring digitized film and video curated by students and staff.

As part of the Wells Library ground floor redesign in 2016, students, faculty, and researchers experience increased access to moving images. The modern space includes a conservation work area for the inspection and repair of film and video collections, two small group film viewing rooms, and a multipurpose screening room able to project 16mm film and legacy video formats as well as state-of-the-art digital technologies. The screening room is a venue for IU Libraries to exhibit its expansive media collections and a resource for members of the  IU community seeking space for public film screenings.

Learn more about our screening room and how to reserve it.

We continue to actively acquire collections to grow Indiana University's archive.  Read more about our collecting policy.

A few highlights:

• 10,000 classroom films from the Lane Education Service District of  Eugene, Oregon, originally intended for elementary school students.
• The Alan Lewis Collection is a large archive of over 200 cameras, projectors, viewers, and editors with original cases and instruction manuals, creating an important and unique snapshot of motion picture history.  Read a Washington Post article on this topic.  
• The Robert Young Motion Picture Collection: film prints and production elements from an Indianapolis industrial filmmaker who made films for International Harvester, the Indiana State Police, and the Farm Bureau Insurance Companies.
• The Elkhart Historical Society donated the Frink Film Studio collection that includes sponsored films made for northern Indiana and Illinois companies including A Good Year for Wheat (1958 for the Christian Rural Overseas Program) and Rubber Removal (1973, O’Hare Airport).
• Accomplished director and film studies instructor David Bradley collected nearly 4,000 films throughout his life, developing an unprecedented collection of both classic and rare productions from the United States and Europe with the silent film era particularly well represented.  
• Donated corporate records and over 20,000 videotapes from the Agency for Instructional Technology/Television (AIT), an Emmy Award winning educational media production company from Indiana.
• Films, videos, and papers from Edward and Naomi Feil, who made educational and sponsored films in Ohio. Their work includes The Inner World of Aphasia, which was added to the prestigious National Film Registry by the Librarian of Congress in 2015.
• Tens of thousands of television advertisements from 1959 to 1990 in The Former Clio Archive purchased by London International Awards in 1992.
• Hundreds of Hollywood features that were re-edited and released as educational films by Teaching Film Custodians.
• Educational Films - IU holds more than 60,000 films intended for classroom use, one of the most extensive historic educational film collections in existence. This includes films from all of the major educational film producers such as Encyclopedia Britannica, Coronet, and Centron. Indiana University was one of the major distributors of educational films from the 1930s through the 1990s, and one of very few distributors to keep and preserve them. These collections include career training films, U.S. Department of War productions, and more than 5,600 programs produced by the National Educational Television Network, the precursor to PBS.

Learn more about the thousands of films and audio visual materials in our collections.

Our expert archivists assist faculty and film researchers from IU and universities everywhere. We offer consultations, on-site, and digital film access, as well as provide a professional projectionist in our screening room for group experiences.

In 2012, the Archive joined the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF), a collaborative association of the world’s leading institutions dedicated to the rescue, collection, preservation, and screening of film.   Archive Director Rachael Stoeltje served as 2018–2019 Chair of the UNESCO-founded Coordinating Council of Audiovisual Archives Association and is an Executive Committee member of FIAF.

The Moving Image Archive is the recipient of four National Film Preservation Foundation grants to provide restoration and conservation of specific and unique titles. 

Preservation projects include:

• The film “The Master of Disaster” is the only IU-produced film ever nominated for an Academy Award.
• Iconic film director John Ford’s home movies at IU Libraries Lilly Library.
• Hoagy Carmichael 1930s home movies in partnership with IU Libraries Archives of Traditional Music.
• Edward and Naomi Feil’s “The Inner World of Aphasia” which was added to the National Film Registry in 2015.

For more than two decades, IU has been developing and implementing leadership, expertise, and technical structures in media archiving and media preservation. In 2013, understanding that many of its media collections were at risk of deterioration, obsolescence, or both, the university capitalized on these competencies to implement a comprehensive plan for the digitization of audio and video recordings across all campuses.

We play a central role in IU’s Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative known as MDPI. Working closely with IU Libraries IT and  Auxiliary Library Facility, UITS, and digitization vendor Memnon, a Sony Company, the team is scanning and preserving over 33,000 reels of film in three years. 

See a timeline of IU's work in media digitization.