hankyoreh

Film libraries are some of my favorite places. The British Film Institute (BFI) National Library in London is probably the world’s largest with over 50,000 books on the film and television industries in addition to extensive collections of historical film magazines, press clippings, stills, festival catalogues and scripts.

Founded in 1934 as a ‘‘clearing house for information on all matters affecting the production, exhibition and distribution of films ... at home and abroad,’’ the BFI National Library has relocated at least five times in the past 70 years to better accommodate its growing collection and maintain public access.

After graduating from university in 1992, I spent five years researching Asian film in its reading room. The library was full of esoteric characters. Every Monday, there’d be a race for the weekly issue of Variety to read the latest film reviews. On busy days, you had to join a waiting list just to enter.

Before the world wide web, the BFI National Library maintained the world’s largest film database. Initially cross-referenced on physical index cards going back to the 1930s, the data was typed into an in-house computer database in the 1980s. Public access was made available through terminals in the library’s reading room.

Held back by bureaucracy and fear, the BFI missed opportunities to take its database online to the wider public in the 1990s. In contrast to the Internet Movie Database’s (IMDb) distributed approach, data is compiled by a knowledgeable and meticulous in-house team that maintain its quality. Until about 2002, it was still probably the world’s best film database.

In 1996, I spent four weeks in Seocho-gu, within walking distance of the Korean Film Archive (KFA) and its reading room. I was shocked to see circles of video monitors where anybody could view movies for free from unlocked cabinets of VHS tapes. In London, viewing was strictly by appointment only, in basement rooms and billed by the hour.

It had never occurred to me how perverse it was that you could spend days reading about a specific film in the BFI National Library but never easily experience it at first hand. It’s as if there is an unwritten rule that there are those who are qualified to have an opinion on films and those who are only qualified to listen to those opinions.

The KFA has just relocated to an 18-billion won center in Sangam-dong with 26 viewing stations in the library’s reading room where the public can watch DVDs for free. By year’s end, the Archive plans to have 900 Korean feature films ready for digital streaming within the library in addition to 700 independent films and documentaries.

There were few people using the BFI National Library reading room this summer. May and June may be slow months as students concentrate on exams, but the decline in numbers is still striking. Film libraries and archives have lost their monopoly on the documentation of film history as the public turn to Google, IMDb and Wikipedia.

Whereas film libraries in Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan have adapted to this shift, the BFI National Library may close to the public in 2008. Despite a membership fee system, it is no longer ‘‘economically viable’’ to keep it open in its current location. But no new home has been found. The internet didn’t retire the world’s best film library, it pulled the trigger itself.