The majority of our holdings are under the name of the AFI Research Collection. These holdings include clippings files, books, magazines, scripts, film promotional material and so on. A number of our holdings are pre-WW2 publications and we are continually adding to the Collection.
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Our holdings
Clippings files
The AFI Research Collection has collected over 30,000 clipping files from newspapers and magazines since the late 1970s. The scope of the clippings relate to films and tv shows screened in Australia, including foreign films and tv, and the Australian film/tv industry and people in general.
The amount of materials within a file often depends on the popularity (or notoriety) of a particular film or tv show, person, or whether a particular subject has been a newsworthy topic. Title clippings files often contain Press Kits and other advertising material which can be very useful background information on a film or tv show.
- 22,000+ Title clippings
- 5,000+ Personality clippings files
- 5,000+ Personality files on Microfiche (1970s-late 1990s)
- 2,000+ Subject clippings files
Books
We hold over 7,000 books relating to a wide range of activities and subjects. The examples of research listed below? may give you some idea of what items we hold. Some other areas where we have plenty of book materials are: film/tv yearbooks (back to the 1930s), filmographies by country, histories of film/tv companies, biographies on film/tv people (actors, directors, producers, screenwriters, cinematographers etc).
Journals
We hold over 800 different journals in the AFIRC, though if the count was done by individual journal issue the amount would number into the tens of thousands. We believe our journal collection is expansive within the film/tv subject areas and there are countless gems of little known and rarely seen journals within our collection.
Stills and posters
Over 1,000+ folders (many of these including multiple images) as well as over 400+ film posters.
Microfilm
We have a number of hard to find journals on Microfilm that can be accessed via our Microfilm Reader/Scanner. They include: Variety (1906-1977), Everyone’s (1920-1937), Film Weekly (1927-1971), Australian Variety and Show World.
Scripts
The AFI Research Collection holds 1,000+ scripts from the Australian Writer’s Guild, the AFI/AACTA, as well as a large number as part of the Crawfords Collection. Many of these scripts are annotated and are at different levels of completion.