Metadata

Cultivating the Garden

With over 155,000 titles, what information is missing? Through the diligent efforts of Scarecrow’s inventory team, over 70,000 titles have information that can be tied to an external source. There was plenty of trimming, pruning and fertilizing of those titles to make certain that they’re in good health. Avoiding duplicates and bad matches, then merging television series and other multi-volume sets to the most streamlined array of associations is a constant task as thousands of new titles are added each year.

The Task Ahead

Around 85,000 titles have no link to external information. Instead of a listing for cast, crew and information about alternate titles, they might only include basic details such as the title, duration and date of release. Making certain that the physical item in the library is correctly identified and associated with the proper external information is an arduous task that demands meticulous attention to detail. While the regular inventory team continues their daily work of adding new titles to the inventory, we’re expanding our efforts to backfill the rest of the catalog.

Scarecrow’s library is searchable by Title or Cast / Crew. You can then Filter those results to find the object of your desire.

Titles

All 155,000 entries have title information. Most have the date of its original release and country of origin and pertinent information about format, language and other details specific to a particular release. That means a title-search is going to be pretty effective. We’re working on making sure individual elements of more complex releases are also searchable. Want to find a particular Popeye cartoon, for instance? Most of them have been treated as individual titles. If you search for one, a collection containing that particular title should appear. Title-search has been–and will continue to be–the most complete method of identifying if something is in our library!

Cast / Crew

Cast / Crew is a new method of searching the inventory. For a search by the name of an individual to reveal a title, that title must have pulled the full cast and crew into the search. Currently, that means 70,000 of the 155,000 titles are going to have that information available!

If you search for “Judy Garland” (for instance) you’re going to generate a list of every film in which she appears that has an associated cast-listing. Titles with only the basic information won’t appear. In time, populating those titles with additional details will become important to make them a vital–and searchable–part of the collection.

Search Filters

Additional filters will help you to refine your search.

SORT BY allows you to order from A-Z, reverse to Z-A or narrow the results to the most Recently Added.

FORMAT limits the results to those titles inclusive of (or particular to) a physical media format, from VHS to 4K.

CAST / CREW allows you to add names and display only the results containing those Cast or Crew members you’ve selected. Results are dependent on titles populated with metadata in those fields.

SECTION limits the results to a particular Section, Subsection or Special Section.

YEAR lets you set a range of dates.

External Metadata

Portions of the external film-related metadata used by Scarecrow–including cast, crew and original release information (and occasionally film-synopses, taglines and poster art)–is supplied by The Movie Database (TMDB).