Prof. Miranda Ala Rechi
Cinematheque of North Macedonia- Filmologyst
Bio: Miranda Ala Rechi was born in Skopje, The Republic of North Macedonia in 1991. She completed her Bachelor Degree in 2015 in English language and literature in Skopje, in “The State University of Tetova”. At first she works as an English language professor in elementary and high school but also in many language centers. She continues her language career with book translations and works on different websites as a web content creator. She joins the Cinematheque of North Macedonia in 2019, taking a position as a filmologyst involving herself in the film sphere and all Cinematheques processes. Her main work is primary cinematographic film processing but she also makes cataloguing and film bibliography for the published Cinematheques online catalogue base. She is also involved in the international activities of the Cinematheque.
Title: The importance of film cataloguing
Cataloguing is the process of creating and systematically arranging records that describe the materials held in a particular institution or in a group of institutions or in private collections. In addition, cataloguing creates systematised bibliographic and author records of a given institution (library, archive, etc.), creating databases of books, audiovisual materials, photographs, sound records, cartographic and other materials. Without cataloguing, you can’t know what you have in your collection and you can’t easily share those resources with others. It is of great help in the preservation of materials, by reducing their damage through disproportionate use, because people can find out, from the descriptive information, whether the particular film is the one they need, without the film being exploited. A catalogue can help identify and locate existing versions and authors of a film, provide copy information for a work, and searching other people’s collections can help identify items needed for conservation and restoration projects. In order for the catalogue to be as good and useful as possible, the data, names, authors, terms, indexing, topics, and processing contents must be standardised. For example, one person may catalogue moving images, another motion pictures, a third film, or audiovisual materials, all of which mean the same thing. Without standardised data, the researcher will not get an accurate picture of the films indexed under different terms unless he or she searches under each individual term.