Earlier this year, the Museum of the Moving Image out in Astoria, Queens shut its doors for a major renovation and expansion.

For me this museum’s main value has been its screening series—almost always interesting and valuable. A recent retrospective, a career-spanning Frank Borzage series, offered an large number of rarely seen films that were great to watch on a big screen. The museum’s chief curator, David Schwartz, is an excellent programmer that is always on the lookout for overlooked gems, old and new, deserving to be seen.

As for the museum itself, it was fairly lacking. A permanent exhibit on the various ways the moving image has been created over the years was mildly interesting but never worth more than one visit. Beyond that, the museum’s focus seemed to be on a revolving exhibition of classic video games—good for a little diversion while waiting for a screening but hardly worth the focus the museum gave it.

So hearing of the closing, which will go until early 2010 or so, was bittersweet. Perhaps a refresh of the facility, which is due to get much larger, will inject some innovative life into the exhibitions, but I’m saddened to go without the aforementioned programs for well over a year (although some of their event programming is continuing at alternative venues).

Perhaps as a sign of the reinvigorated museum to come, this past week saw the launch of a fantastic new online resource. The Moving Image Source is an interesting site that gathers new critical and scholarly writings, an international calendar of film-related events, and a research guide on other online resources.

The lineup of people involved with the site is particularly encouraging: Former Village Voice critic Dennis Lim is editor-in-chief, with contributions from such notable names as Melissa Anderson, Michael Atkinson and Jonathan Rosenbaum, among others. It feels like the site is redeeming the sins of newspaper and magazine editors who have been implying lately that critical writing on film is no longer relevant. Every article in the first edition is an excellent read, and portends great things to come.