Founded in 2009, the archive's initial holdings consisted of over 100,000 educational, documentary, and other unique films that were either created or distributed by Indiana University.
[4] The archive has collaborated with numerous agencies worldwide, including the Library of Congress and Visible Evidence, the international conference on documentary film and media.
[8] In 2017, film archivist Alan Lewis donated his collection of approximately 200 small gauge cameras and 50 projectors to the Moving Image Archive.
[4][12] Part of the Moving Image Archive's initial holdings, the Educational Film Collection was created before World War II as an outreach service provided by the Indiana University Extension Office.
[13] In addition to production elements from their films, the collection contains many of their home movies showing their travels to various destinations around the world in the latter half of the 20th century.