Birthdays, summer trips to Disneyland and Pikes Peak and Yellowstone, graduations, Boy Scout jamborees, Skipper's puppies, parades and picnics and parties the everyday life of Robert W. and Wilma Jones and their four children. It's all here for your viewing pleasure Saturday at the Marriott Library. And you're invited to stage your own family film premiere, too.

As part of Home Movie Day 2004, the Marriott Library's Special Collections multimedia division staff is hauling out old film projectors and inviting the public to bring in home movies for screenings. Staff also will have books on hand about preserving home movie film and pamphlets on where and how to get it transferred to another format.

Yes, they really want you to share Johnnie's first haircut and Betty's graduation and that trip to Flaming Gorge on the big screen.

Now in its second year, Home Movie Day is a celebration of amateur filmmaking and the arcane slices of life caught on old 8 mm, super 8 and 16 mm film.

This is the first time the U. library has participated in the worldwide event. Its participation reflects a growing recognition in academia that home movies are a rich source of information about the past, particularly home and family life, and worthy of adding to research archives.

"We're hoping a lot of people will bring different things. We're hoping, too, for donations," said Tawnya Mosier, the Marriott Library's film and audio-visual archivist.

Donors receive a copy of their film on whatever format they prefer. Their donated films are cleaned, given new feeder tape, transferred to video, cataloged and stored in original containers. Copies are then made available for viewing at the library, Mosier said.

Even though digital and video camcorders are ubiquitous today, Mosier believes the medium is less likely to provide the kind of long-lasting record of film stock.

In addition to amateur home movies, archivist Jimi Jones is building an independent movie archive focused on films made in or about Utah. The collection currently consists of seven films, most shot by students in the university's film program. Among them: "The Racketeers," by Kimball Johnson, which premiered at the Salt Lake Film and Art Center, and "The First Vampire," a 2004 film by Randy Weiss, made while he was a student at UCLA; Weiss is now a photography professor at Westminster College.

To date, the library has received 20 collections, ranging from 10 to 15 reels of footage to nearly 200.

Several document Utah's early ski industry and pioneers. The Alton Crane Melville Collection is one of those.

Alton's son Marvin participated on the 1958 U.S. Olympic Alpine team, was the 1959 NCAA champion in the downhill, slalom and combined ski events, and was a member of the 1960 F.I.S. ski teams. He later went on to coach the 1964 Women's Olympic Ski Team and the University of Utah Ski Team. He was inducted into the Sports Hall of Fame in 1990.

Such laurels aside, there is something fascinating about being able to watch Marvin as a little boy riding a donkey and riding the children's float in the East Millcreek Parade on July 4, 1940.

Shot between 1940 and 1982, the 113 or so film reels donated by the family include, of course, much more footage of Marvin learning to ski, training and racing in numerous competitions.

The History Channel has used such films in the U.'s collection for an in-progress documentary on the history of skiing and snowboarding.

Home movies like the Jones' are valuable because they give researchers a peek at home life - fashions, furnishings and family interaction. The Jones home movie collection includes 186 three-minute reels shot between 1952 and 1978, much of it in Vernal, where the couple raised their family.

There was hardly a family event that went unrecorded, from little Rosemary learning to crawl to Mother's Day 1954, and the family trip to the 1962 Seattle World's Fair.

"We couldn't get out of church on Sunday morning in our new Easter clothes without getting a new picture taken," said Robert Jones, the couples' youngest son.

He donated the collection to the library in hopes of preserving his mother's well-kept film library - figuring also there might be historical interest.

His father operated R.W. Bob Jones Trucking, which specializes in transporting oil derricks; in 1949, Robert W. Jones moved the first commercial oil producing rig into and then out of Utah.

Several film reels in the collection show Robert W. Jones at work on rigs.

If you go

What: Home Movie Day 2004

When: Saturday from 1 to 5 p.m.

Where: Gould Auditorium, Marriott Library, University of Utah

Who: Anyone with 8 mm, super 8 or 16 mm home movie film is welcome to bring their reels, which will be inspected for condition and then shown on the library's

projectors.

What else: It's free! For more information, contact Tawnya Mosier at 801-585-3073.