JISC

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The project will deliver 600 hours of unique moving image materials and digitised contextual documents to educational communities and the public across the UK. It will pursue a curated and thematic approach; demonstrating how the key social, political and economic issues of our time have been represented, illustrated, expressed and debated through moving image media forms.

Material featured will include public record films, parliamentary coverage, national news broadcasts, and campaigning films. This project will make research materials currently only accessible at one location widely available throughout further and higher education and to a wider public.

The project

The media play a critical role in our society by informing and educating citizens from a variety of perspectives. For more than 70 years the state has addressed the public on a wide range of issues using information films. Since 1978 we have been able to witness Parliament – the very core of our political system – in action first on radio and then on television. Our national public service broadcasters – ITN and BBC – in their role as part of the fourth estate have offered mediated packages of the ‘news’, informing Britain’s citizens about national and regional issues. Regional television has produced further perspectives and agendas.

InView will be an in-depth resource which shows, through the juxtaposition and contextualisation of a range of materials, how public issues ‘play out’ across the media. A thematic approach will illustrate how different producers and distributors of moving image content provide different voices and perspectives within national social, cultural and economic debates.

The user will be able not only to study each issue in chronological sequence, but also to compare its moving image representation by different participants in every national debate. The unique strength of the resource is that it will be sourced from different collections of national importance, each carrying the voice of a different section of the polity, from public record films to Parliamentary coverage, national and regional news and campaigning films.

The content

The project will digitise collections held at The BFI and The National Archive at Kew. The online resource will be organised into two parts:

• Britain: Economy and Citizenry: Films and television programming reviewing the UK economy, its industries, transport and agriculture, tracing the radical shifts each has undergone in the past 60 years with the advent and subsequent decline of the mixed economy consensus and demonstrating the social impact of these changes.
• Britain: National Issues Material concerning the health services, education, immigration, multi-culturalism and regionalism tracking 70 years of public debate, observing both continuities and shifts in prevailing national attitudes as well as in government policies.

The project will also involve the digitisation of paper documents and other contextual materials currently held in controlled archival environments at the BFI or at The National Archives in Kew.

The National Archive holds production files relating to the majority of the films in the public records collection, often adding crucial context not only to the immediate circumstances of production, but also to the motives and methods of the government departments which initiated it.

Additionally, the BFI holds the special collections of major film-makers whose work is represented in the public records collection - notably, the papers of Basil Wright and Edgar Anstey. Papers directly relevant, and adding significant interpretive context, to the digitised films will be selected and digitised as part of the project.

The process

This project will involve the digitisation of an envisaged 600 hours of moving image material of and paper documents. These materials will originate both on film and on a variety of video tape formats. The original condition of the materials (particularly film items) will be variable, but expertise in handling and restoration, when required, is a core competence within the BFI. The majority of the of paper documents, production files and other contextual materials are held at The National Archive and will be catalogued and digitised. Our technical approach will involve taking archival film and video materials through preservation-conscious steps to a stage where web-based video files are available for download. Existing descriptions and catalogue records will be amalgamated into a set of standards compliant searchable metadata.

The future

While this project will make research materials currently only accessible at one location widely available throughout further and higher education, the material is also clearly relevant to the citizenship curriculum in secondary and further education and the government's Lifelong Learning agenda. The BFI is already working closely with the National Education Network and we envisage a collaboration with them to develop significant additional materials for these constituencies. We also intend to provide as much of this material as we can to the broader UK public under the non-commercial creative archive licence and to make it fully available via the Internet.

Download the project plan

Download the final report (PDF)