Explore the Media History Digital Library

Lantern is the search and visualization platform for nearly 2 million pages of digitized books and magazines from the histories of film, broadcasting, and recorded sound. When you're ready to search, just use the search bar above. You can also use the additional options in the Advanced Search menu to fine-tune your search.

Not sure what you're looking for?

The Media History Digital Library is dedicated to digitizing historic books, magazines, and other materialas about film, broadcasting, and recorded sound and making this content available for broad public access. The Lantern platform provides many options for searching and browsing the extensive collections.

We've curated several collections of materials related to specific aspects of film, radio, and broadcasting. The bulk of the MHDL collection features magazines focused on film, radio, and broadcasting. Some of these periodicals focus on aspects of film from the perspective of industry , while some are catered towards movie-going audiences. Other materials discuss the history and progress of radio or document the filmic precursor of “Magic Lantern shows."

You can read more about these collections and the MHDL project at mediahistoryproject.org.

Recently Updated Pages:

We're continually scanning new items as well as updating the information and descriptions for items already in the collections. Here's a preview of pages that have recently been updated or added:

Recently Added Books:
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