Technicolor Online Research Archive
Explore the George Eastman Museum’s Technicolor Online Research Archive. More than 40,000 documents ranging in date from 1914 to 1955—notes, journals, correspondence, film tests, technical drawings, and more—from the museum’s Technicolor collections are available to search and browse.
About the Technicolor Online Research Archive
Funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, with matching funds from Technicolor and the Cecil B. DeMille Foundation, the Technicolor Online Research Archive is a digital-asset database containing high-resolution scans and catalogue records. Each scanned document is presented along with its unique information, such as subject, date of creation, author, and type of object. Selected records are displayed alongside a transcription to facilitate discoverability and reading. The Technicolor Online Research Archive gives students, researchers, and film fans alike unprecedented access to the inner workings of one of the most important companies in the history of cinema.
To begin a new browsing session, first clear any previously selected access terms from the bar below the search box. In most cases access terms are from Library of Congress Authorities and the Getty Vocabularies. More information about individual headings and their usage can be found on their respective websites.
Browse the items in the collections using the subject headings, names, or date range found in the left-hand navigation bar.
Use the search function to find something more specific; this searches most fields, including the document text, which contains any transcriptions.
All records exist as both individual pages (TIFF) and a combined file (PDF). If a search returns only a few individual pages of a notebook as TIFFs, you can use the filename to search for the PDF to see the entire document. The PDFs have “[full document]” after the title.
For any inquiries, please contact [email protected]. If you have a question about a particular item, please include the filename in your email, as it will help us to address your request more quickly.
The Technicolor Online Research Archive comprises several distinct collections held by the George Eastman Museum:
The Technicolor Notebooks Collection contains valuable information on the beginnings of the company and its forays into early color filmmaking. The collection consists of research notebooks produced by Technicolor scientists from 1914 to 1958, donated to the museum by Eastman Kodak Company in 1980, as well as research notebooks of Leonard Troland and John F. Kienninger, purchased by the museum for the collection in 2013.
The Technicolor Corporate Archive contains a wide array of corporate documents, correspondence, company histories, promotional materials, and financial records, donated to the museum by Technicolor in 2009. The items scanned for this project span the years 1916 to 1986.
The Technicolor News and Views Collection is a series of promotional newsletters produced by the company from 1939 to 1955. Donated by Eastman Kodak Company in the 1960s, these objects are currently held in the George Eastman Museum’s Richard and Ronay Menschel Library.
The John M. Andreas Collection contains the papers of Dr. John M. Andreas, head of the research department at Technicolor during the company’s busiest years, from the 1940s to the 1960s. The collection, which was donated to the museum by the Andreas family in 2005, focuses on dye and chemical research, in the context of improving Technicolor’s dye-imbibition process, as well as a wide variety of miscellaneous research projects the company took on during those years. The museum also holds Andreas’s collection of dye powders, many of which are on display in the museum’s Potter Peristyle.