Post
by Frederica » Wed Dec 08, 2010 4:32 pm
In all our justifiable excitement about Nita’s edible chapeaux (thank heavens there aren’t a lot of photos of Nita’s shoes) I forgot to mention a few things we at Naldi HQ were interested in doing with this website. Some things we’ve achieved, some not so much.
Chris has decided to do essays on all of the plays in which Nita appeared. These will not necessarily be Nita-centric although she won't be left out. He can tell you more about what information he’s including, and we’ll announce as each essay is completed and uploaded. Obviously those essays will be of more interest to the theater peeps than to the film peeps, but I suspect there will be a flurry of fascinated interest when he does his essay on Worth a Million, in which Nita co-starred with (wait for it) Charley Chase.
In the hopes of making the site more rigorous than the average biographical website, I wanted to include graphics of all the references cited and other documentation such as film reviews, either as a pdf or a jpg. I also wanted to include other materials not sourced or used--fluffy publicity articles, etc. I have included a selection of articles, but I immediately ran into rights and privacy issues.
I have all the Variety reviews for Nita’s films, but since Variety just unveiled their entire archive online, I suspect they might be guarding their copyrights jealously. Wherever I could, I attached whatever film reviews I had, leaning toward reviews that were not available online. I wanted to put up more. Foo.
Public records proved troublesome. Court records are always public domain, so I could attach what was left of Nita’s bankruptcy case, in this case only the final judgment. Ancestry allows use of their materials as long as they are used in conjunction with a family history; that applied in this case so I included records I found on Ancestry. I ran into problems with vital records such as birth, death, and marriage certs. Until recently those were considered public record, but many states and individual counties are now beginning to reverse themselves on that issue due to privacy concerns and identity theft. I decided to err on the side of conservatism and did not put up scans, contenting myself with proper citations for each record. Double foo.
Ditto with books and periodicals--some of those are under copyright, and I’m not sure whether “fair use” would extend to what I wanted to do. Again, I had to content myself with a citation. Foo trifecta.
So although the site is not exactly as documentation-heavy as I’d originally envisioned, what is there is properly cited, and there is more documentation that you’d normally find on a website.
Say, the Profile on the top of the page is magnificent! Where can I get a photo like that? Great site with plenty of interesting photos and information. What no Sally Lung??? That's the first thing I looked for! 
Whoops, OK, I found the 10 COMMANDMENTS stills! Sorry.
