Entertainment sources

Film and television

Cast, credits, release history and the catalogues that record them.

IMDb

The widest coverage of cast and crew credits. Best treated as a starting point: entries are user-maintained and release dates often reflect the first festival showing.

The Movie Database

themoviedb.org

Community-maintained and openly licensed, with a documented API. Useful when you need structured data you are allowed to reuse.

AFI Catalog of Feature Films

catalog.afi.com

Scholarly catalogue of American feature films, with production and copyright notes drawn from primary records. The reference to check when other sources disagree.

BFI

bfi.org.uk

British film and television holdings, including the national archive catalogue and the Screenonline reference material.

Turner Classic Movies

tcm.com

Broadcast schedules plus a film database with production notes; strong on classical-era Hollywood.

Letterboxd

letterboxd.com

Release and viewing data organised around lists. Good for tracking what exists in a series or a director’s filmography.

Music and recordings

Discographies, pressings and release identification.

MusicBrainz

musicbrainz.org

Open music encyclopaedia with stable identifiers for artists, releases and recordings. The right source when you need to refer to a specific release unambiguously.

Discogs

discogs.com

Catalogue of physical releases down to individual pressings, matrix numbers and label variants. Unmatched for telling two editions apart.

AllMusic

allmusic.com

Editorial reviews and credits, including session personnel that discographies often omit.

45worlds

45worlds.com

Collector-maintained listings for vinyl, tape and other formats, with release dates and label detail for material the larger databases cover thinly.

Second Hand Songs

secondhandsongs.com

Traces cover versions back to originals. The quickest way to settle who recorded a song first.

Radio and spoken word

Broadcast listings, recordings and preservation records.

Internet Archive: Old Time Radio

archive.org

The largest freely accessible collection of American radio drama and variety. Transfer quality varies considerably between uploads of the same episode.

BBC Genome

genome.ch.bbc.co.uk

Radio Times listings from 1923 to 2009, scanned and searchable. The reliable way to establish when a British programme actually went out.

National Recording Registry

loc.gov

The Library of Congress list of recordings selected for preservation, each with a short essay explaining why it was chosen.

Radio Echoes

radioechoes.com

Organised by series with episode logs, which makes it easier to identify a broadcast than browsing a flat archive.

Podcast Index

podcastindex.org

Open index of podcast feeds. Useful for finding a show’s original feed when the directories only show apps.

Watching for free, legitimately

Public-domain and institutional collections.

Internet Archive: Feature Films

archive.org

Feature-length films uploaded as public domain or with permission. Status is asserted by uploaders, so verify before reusing anything.

Prelinger Archives

archive.org

Advertising, educational and industrial films, most explicitly cleared for reuse. The standard source for archival footage in documentaries.

National Screening Room

loc.gov

Library of Congress moving image collection, with rights status stated per item — which is exactly what most free-film sites leave out.

The Public Domain Review

publicdomainreview.org

Edited selections from public-domain collections, with the provenance of each item set out properly.

Rights, records and classification

When you need to know who owns something.

U.S. Copyright Office Public Catalog

cocatalog.loc.gov

Registrations and renewals from 1978 onward. The primary record, not a summary of it.

Stanford Copyright Renewal Database

exhibits.stanford.edu

Renewal records for books published 1923–1963, digitised and searchable. The practical way to test whether a work of that period lapsed.

BBFC

bbfc.co.uk

Every British classification decision with the certified running time, which is often the only contemporaneous measurement of a cut that exists.

ISAN

isan.org

International standard identifier for audiovisual works. Relevant if you are matching records across systems rather than reading about one film.

Trade press and history

Contemporary sources, before the story settled.

Lantern / Media History Digital Library

lantern.mediahist.org

Full-text search across digitised film and broadcasting trade journals. The single most useful resource here for establishing what was reported at the time.