About
Fantastic Film Festivals (FFF): Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction Film Fests in the US and Canada collects, organizes, creates, and links to festival resources, scholarship, and data related to the programming of genre films and events at film festivals.
This site is designed to assist the fantastic genre film festival pursuits of media scholars, genre enthusiasts, festival programmers, media makers, cinephiles, information professionals/librarians, and media curators.
This site emphasizes:
- collecting programs and schedules from fantastic film festivals & reformatting them for scholarship & analysis, convenient searching, dynamic/interactive environments, and cultural heritage preservation
- academic resources and scholarly endeavors seeking to expand upon US/Canadian fantastic film festival knowledge and literature
- compiling resources for dedicated genre enthusiasts & festival attendees seeking to identify festivals, films, or directors for personal enrichment
- sharing FFF items for scholarly use or general awareness of genre film festivals (FFF items can be shared via social media by clicking on the icons on the bottom of the page. Visit and like the FFF facebook page for alerts when new items are added to the FFF site. )
The academic, US/Canadian, and genre focus addresses current gaps in film festival literature, and reflects the scholarly interests of the site creator. (Other online sources have been established with a commercial, trade, or news emphasis, or with a focus on European genre festivals.) "Non-scholarly" sources considered significant or intriguing will be included.
Suggestions/feedback/requests for removal:
This site is growing, so please visit again to see how it develops as content, data, and resources are added. Contact FFF with suggestions or feedback. Also, FFF honors the rights and wishes of fantastic film festivals and will remove items from the the FFF Collections, or will add additional copyright statements, when requested by a festival representative or rights owner.
Site history & administrators:
The FFF site is a project to explore the tools and roles of librarians in digital humanities research while analyzing genre fest programming and resources. The Omeka.net web publishing platform/content management system was chosen due to ease-of-use, nominal costs, adhering to Dublin Core metadata standards, and for the flexible capabilities with sharing and managing primary source materials that were gathered or created for the project. Viewshare, TAMS Analyzer (open source qualitative analysis and coding software), and other analysis tools were used to create data sets and other documents.
The site creator and administrator, Linda Rath, is a librarian at Newman Library, Baruch College, The City University of New York (CUNY). Linda Rath received a PSC-CUNY Research Award as support to further expand the site and share results. Olinshar Nguyen and Andrew Fassel joined FFF as co-administrators/ researchers. All are responsible for managing, analyzing, and exhibiting genre film festival artifacts, and creating new artifacts for scholarly exploration of genre film festivals.
To date, three articles have been published:
- "Building a DIY genre film festivals web resource to empower digital scholarship and cultural heritage participation." (2017) in Moving Image (Vol. 17, no. 1)
- "Omeka.net as a librarian-led digital humanities meeting place" (2016) in New Library World (Vol.117 Iss.3/4)
- "Low-barrier-to-entry data tools: creating and sharing humanities data" (2016) in Library Hi-Tech (Vol.34 Iss 2).