Cinematic Brno Documentation

Contact email: digitalia@phil.muni.cz

Updated: 24. 2. 2022

Introduction

The Cinematic Brno Database aims to provide the academic and general public with information about film culture in Brno between 1918-1945. Brno and the cultural history of film up to 1945, supported by the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic (408/08/0959).

The database consists of two main parts. The database contains information about individual cinemas, their programmes and information about films screened in Brno between 1918-1945. The second part consists of transcripts of semi-structured interviews with narrators - visitors to Brno cinemas before 1945. Individual interviews are further divided into specific quotations according to sorted categories. The database contains image materials, namely archival photographs of cinemas and scanned programmes from newspapers. In 2021, a decision was made to allocate licences based on a proposal developed by the Open Science team of the Masaryk University.

The intended target audience is primarily academics and students of the Faculty and other staff, and secondarily students and academics from other universities and the general public.

Pavel Skopal, Petr Szczepanik, Lucie Česálková and Anna Batistová participated in the curatorial development of the database, while Dušan Barok took care of the technical aspects of the database. At a later stage, Terézia Porubčanská took over the care of the database and the work on data collection was coordinated by Michal Večeřa.

In 2022, the Cinematic Brno database was transferred to the existing Islandora system within the LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ project. Film Brno thus became part of the faculty infrastructure Digitalia MUNI ARTS.

Technical implementation

The Islandora system consists of several components:

• Drupal is used to manage the repository content, store metadata and provide a rich user interface.

• The files themselves are stored in Fedora. Fedora services include versioning and fixity checking.

• Apache Solr is used for indexing content and searching the repository.

• Islandora microservices provide synchronization of Drupal and Fedora content and integration of various image, video, and text processing applications.

A more detailed diagram of Islandora's architecture is included in its documentation.

Individual entries in factual database Cinematic Brno are stored as Drupal Nodes and grouped by type into Content Types. The database contains these Content types:

Cinema, Film, Organization, Narrator, Number, Person, Programme, Quote

In addition to these types, other auxiliary types are included in Cinematic Brno to better filter records or store information about relationships between objects: Cinema name, Cinema location, License holder reference (company) and License holder reference (person). These types are hidden from the user (they cannot be browsed or searched).

The files (images) are stored in the repository as Media entities of type Simple image. Media entities are then attached to individual Nodes (Cinema and Programme types only).

The PhotoSwipe JavaScript viewer (integrated via the Drupal module PhotoSwipe) is used to display images on Cinema and Programme pages.

Indexing and search

The content in Cinematic Brno database can be browsed by type - under the Database tab in the main menu there are Cinema, Film, Number, Programme, Person and Organisation pages. Under the Oral histories tab are the Narrators and Quotes pages.

On the home page, the user has a map of Brno, on which they can filter the cinemas in the database by the year of their existence. On the map, the cinemas will appear in the location and with the name they had in that year.

Apache Solr is used for indexing and searching the repository.

There are 3 indexes created in Cinematic Brno:

• Cinematic Brno database content - indexes records of type Cinema, Cinema name, Cinema location, Film, Organisation, Number and Person.

• Cinematic Brno programmes - separate index for records of type Programme.

• Cinematic Brno oral history - indexes records of Narrator and Quote types.

The global full-text search (top right) searches the Cinematic Brno content index entries. In addition, on the single type pages (in the Database or Oral histories tabs) the user can full-text search all records of the respective type.

All search fields provide an autocomplete function.

Type-specific filters can also be applied to the individual record type pages. For example, the Film page provides a Year and Country filter.

Characters belonging to these categories (Unicode Character Categories) are ignored in searches:

• Punctuation, Connector Characters

• Punctuation, Dash Characters

• Punctuation, Close Characters

• Punctuation, Final quote Characters

• Punctuation, Initial quote Characters

• Punctuation, Other Characters

• Punctuation, Open Characters

Servers, Backup, Integrity and Authenticity

The system uses the infrastructure for running virtual servers at Masaryk University built on VMware technology located at the MU Institute of Computer Science. The operating system is Ubuntu LTS (as recommended by Islandora Community).

Backups are performed regularly to a tape device built on Bacula system managed at the Institute of Technical University of Masaryk University.

Changes in metadata of all record types are recorded in Drupal. Users with the Content editor role can view, compare, delete, or revert to a previous version of objects (called Revisions).

User roles

Content of the factual database Cinematic Brno is accessible to non-logged-in users. Such a user can 'browse' individual records and files, apply filters and use full-text search.

Logged in users with the Content editor role have access to record edit forms. They can also manage versions of objects (see Servers, backups, integrity and authenticity).

An OAI-PMH endpoint of all works in DK AN is created for sharing metadata in DC.

The content of the repository is accessible via the REST API. The supported formats for the GET method are csv, json and jsonld.

URI of each object: https://cinematic-brno.phil.muni.cz/node/\[record id]

Privacy Policy

The Matomo tool is deployed to track the usage of the site. The collected data is stored on a local server.

Content of the database

Terms of use

The Faculty of Arts of MU licenses the copyright to the database (excluding works of authorship as direct elements of the database) under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. It also licenses the special rights of the database creator under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) license. Please note that the provided distribution of the dataset contains personal data within the meaning of Act No. 101/2000 Coll. on the processing of personal data and EU Regulation No. 2016/679 (General Data Protection Regulation, so-called GDPR). The recipient of this dataset distribution becomes the data controller. He must therefore comply with the legal obligations arising from the effective data protection legislation. This includes in particular the obligation to process personal data for lawful purposes, in an appropriate manner and for the time necessary to achieve those purposes, on the basis of a lawful legal title. If the secondary user of the database does not have such a purpose, this part of the database cannot be further processed.

The files contained

The factual database Cinematic Brno contains images of cinemas and scans of programmes in JPEG format. These images can be viewed on the individual cinema and program pages using the PhotoSwipe viewer.

Metadata

The Cinematic Brno stores metadata in Drupal Fieds. The different record types have a defined list of corresponding Fields. When exporting metadata in the DC schema, these Fields are mapped to DC schema elements.

Complete metadata schema of the Film Brno factual database.

Content type	Label	Machine name	Field type
Cinema	Title	title	Text (plain)
	District	field_district	Entity reference
	Identifier	field_identifier	Text (plain)
	Licence holder (company)	field_licence_holder_company	Entity reference
	Licence holder (person)	field_licence_holder_person	Entity reference
	Member of	field_member_of	Entity reference
	Model	field_model	Entity reference
	Number of play days a week	field_play_days	Text (plain)
	Operator (company)	field_operator_company	Entity reference
	Operator (person)	field_operator_person	Entity reference
	Pricing	field_pricing	Text (plain)
	Resources	field_resources	Text (plain, long)
	Seating	field_seating	Double Field
	Special note	field_special_note	Text (plain, long)
	Taxes	field_taxes	Text (plain)
	Technical equipment	field_technical_equipment	Text (plain, long)
Cinema location	Title	title	Text (plain)
	Cinema	field_cinema	Entity reference
	Encyclopaedia of Brno	field_encyclopaedia_of_brno	Link
	From	field_from	Text (plain)
	From (year)	field_from_year	Number (integer)
	Geolocation	field_geolocation	Geolocation
	Street name (current)	field_street_name_current	Text (plain)
	Street name (historic)	field_street_name_historic	Text (plain, long)
	To	field_to	Text (plain)
	To (year)	field_to_year	Number (integer)
Cinema name	Title	title	Text (plain)
	Cinema	field_cinema	Entity reference
	From	field_from	Text (plain)
	From (year)	field_from_year	Number (integer)
	To	field_to	Text (plain)
	To (year)	field_to_year	Number (integer)
Film	Title	title	Text (plain)
	Cast	field_cast	Entity reference
	Censorship	field_censorship	Text (plain)
	Censorship (access)	field_censorship_access	Text (plain)
	Country	field_country	Entity reference
	Directed by	field_directed_by	Entity reference
	Distributor	field_distributor	Entity reference
	Film version	field_film_version	Text (plain)
	Identifier	field_identifier	Text (plain)
	Language	field_language	Entity reference
	Length	field_length	Text (plain)
	Member of	field_member_of	Entity reference
	Model	field_model	Entity reference
	Note	field_note	Text (plain, long)
	Original title	field_original_title	Text (plain)
	Premiere (Brno)	field_premiere_brno	Date
	Premiere (CR)	field_premiere_cr	Date
	Producer	field_producer	Entity reference
	Resources	field_resources	Text (plain, long)
	Title	field_title	Text (plain)
	Web	field_web	Link
	Year	field_year	Number (integer)
Organisation	Title	title	Text (plain)
	CFN	field_cfn	Link
	Identifier	field_identifier	Text (plain)
	IMDB	field_imdb	Link
	Organisation type	field_organisation_type	Entity reference
	Resources	field_resources	Text (plain, long)
Licence holder reference (company)	Company	field_company	Entity reference
	Date	field_date	Text (plain)
	Identifier	field_identifier	Text (plain)
Licence holder reference (person)	Date	field_date	Text (plain)
	Identifier	field_identifier	Text (plain)
	Person	field_person	Entity reference
Narrator	Title	title	Text (plain)
	Address (district)	field_district	Entity reference
	Class	field_class	Entity reference
	Class (father)	field_class_father	Entity reference
	Date of birth	field_date_of_birth	Entity reference
	Education	field_education	Entity reference
	Father's nationality	field_nationality_father	Entity reference
	Filename	field_filename	Text (plain)
	Gender	field_sex	Entity reference
	Identifier	field_identifier	Text (plain)
	Mother's nationality	field_nationality_mother	Entity reference
Number	Title	title	Text (plain)
	Film	field_film	Entity reference
	Genre	field_genre	Entity reference
	Identifier	field_identifier	Text (plain)
	Note	field_note	Text (plain, long)
	Number Description (CZ)	field_number_description_cz	Text (plain, long)
	Number Description (DE)	field_number_description_de	Text (plain, long)
	Order number	field_order_number	Text (plain)
	Title (CZ)	field_title_cz	Text (plain)
	Title (DE)	field_title_de	Text (plain)
Person	Title	title	Text (plain)
	Activities	field_activities	Entity reference
	Biography	field_biography	Text (plain, long)
	Born	field_born	Date
	CSN	field_csn	Text (plain)
	Died	field_died	Date
	Identifier	field_identifier	Text (plain)
	IMDB	field_imdb	Link
	Member of	field_member_of	Entity reference
	Model	field_model	Entity reference
	Name	field_name	Double Field
	Resources	field_resources	Link
Programme	Title	title	Text (plain)
	Audience	field_audience	Entity reference
	Cinema	field_cinema	Entity reference
	End date	field_screening_days_to	Date
	Identifier	field_identifier	Text (plain)
	Member of	field_member_of	Entity reference
	Model	field_model	Entity reference
	Note	field_note	Text (plain, long)
	Number of screenings	field_number_of_screenings	Number (integer)
	Numbers	field_numbers	Entity reference
	Programme Description (CZ)	field_programme_description_cz	Text (plain, long)
	Programme Description (DE)	field_programme_description_de	Text (plain, long)
	Programme publishing date	field_program_publishing_date	Date
	Start date	field_screening_days_from	Date
Quote	Title	title	Text (plain)
	Cinema	field_cinema	Entity reference
	Film	field_film	Entity reference
	Film category	field_film_category	Entity reference
	Identifier	field_identifier	Text (plain)
	Interview code	field_interview_code	Text (plain)
	Interview line	field_interview_line	Text (plain)
	Narrator	field_author	Entity reference
	Person	field_person	Entity reference
	Quote	field_quote	Text (formatted, long)
	Quote category	field_quote_category	Entity reference
	Quote code	field_quote_code	Text (plain)
	Quote code (full)	field_quote_code_full	Text (plain)

Some of the fields contain values from controlled vocabularies (Vocabularies). List of Vocabularies in the factual database:

• Audience

• Country

• Date of birth

• District

• Education

• Family

• Film category

• Gender

• Language

• Nationality

• Organisation type

• Profession

• Quote category

• Social class

• Source