ITN and JISC to deliver archive content to UK colleges and universities

In a ground-breaking agreement, some 6000 hours of film and video material from the ITN Archive will be digitised and delivered online to colleges and universities across the UK.
The material will include 12 million still images recently created from the British Pathe newsreel archive.
‘Newsfilm Online’, a project funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), will provide librarians, teachers, lecturers and students with cost-free access to a vast digitised video database drawn from ITN’s collection.
ITN manages one of the world’s largest cinema and television newsfilm libraries, with content dating from 1896 right up to the present day. The archive includes many of the defining moments of 20th Century history, such as the release of Nelson Mandela, the fall of the Berlin Wall and D-Day.
It is an enormous and rapidly expanding resource – a valuable commercial commodity, which also has long-term historical and cultural significance. The agreement was brokered by the British Universities Film and Video Council (BUFVC) and is the first example in the UK of a collaboration in which high quality commercial news archive material will be released online ‘in perpetuity’ for use in learning, teaching and research.
Mark Wood, Chief Executive of ITN, welcomed the agreement, saying: As operators of one of the biggest news and history archives in the world, we are proud to be involved with this project, which will make a tremendous contribution to the learning and teaching resources available to further and higher education establishments. The wealth of digital content produced will also add yet another dimension to our rapidly expanding archive business”.
An initial 10-month scoping study by the BUFVC has already resulted in a sample forty hours of news film in high bit-rate specification for delivery online.
(GB)