While developing terminology for application to the moving image holdings of archives and libraries, the Moving Image Genre-Form Guide follows the traditional methods of film and television scholarship as closely as possible. The vast and steadily growing literature of genre studies has been relied upon: hundreds of books and many more articles authored on genre theory, as well as analyzing specific genres. In addition, the many genre and content lists that archives have developed over the years were examined, along with such other indexing tools as the retrospective indices to the writing on film, the terms in each volume in the American Film Institute Catalog series, and commercial guides to videos. Nonetheless, with the broad range of types of moving image works, there is no single, ready resource to appropriate for a guide to such terms in their archival application.
Utilizing this range of previous work, a committee within the Motion Picture/Broadcasting/Recorded Sound Division has compiled a comprehensive, practical guide to moving image genre and form terminology ever created, covering some 150 terms, all fully defined and exemplified. However, in addition to fulfilling the needs of archivists and librarians, a guide to genre-form terms must also satisfy such other interested groups as moving image scholars and filmmakers. In order to be widely comprehensible to researchers, a guide should offer terms and definitions conforming to general classification practice. Since searches of online databases will be increasingly conducted over the internet, instead of with the assistance of reference librarians, the Moving Image Genre-Form Guide aims to promote the likelihood of outside researchers finding the desired bibliographic records through use of the basic terms in the field.