From film and television footage to images, from e-books to digital monographs: the essential primary and secondary sources that teachers, students and researchers need for their work are available digitally and intuitively. Over the past decade, JISC has been responsible for making over eighty unique collections available digitally for use within education and research. Now, teachers, students and researchers studying across disciplines have a new resource at their fingertips: a chronicle of Northern Ireland in the 60s and 70s, accessed through the BUFVC website.

“Ask anyone from Northern Ireland when ‘the Troubles’ began, and as like as not they will reply ‘5th October 1968’,” says Dr Martin Doherty, Head of the Department of Social and Historical Studies at the University of Westminster.

On that day, participants in a banned civil rights march in Londonderry were set upon by baton-wielding members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, after confrontation in the city’s Duke Street.

Among many other episodes of unrest in Northern Ireland, this one stands out because it was witnessed by three television crews: from the state broadcaster of the Irish Republic, RTE; the local ITV station, Ulster Television; and BBC Northern Ireland.

Doherty goes on, “The pictures of policeman battering defenceless protesters caused outrage in nationalist Ireland and intense disquiet in Great Britain, finally obliging the government to take an interest in the benighted province it had ignored for nearly fifty years. The fallout from 5th October is a stark reminder of the power of the moving image to rouse audiences and embarrass governments, in ways which other media sometimes fail to do. And it is a reminder also of the fact that so much of our understanding of the modern world is shaped by television.”

Against that backdrop and in partnership, the BBC, JISC and the British Universities Film and Video Council (BUFVC) have launched a new academic resource that brings together thousands of hours of footage of Northern Ireland in the 60s and 70s for the very first time. The audio-visual archives of the BBC contain a wealth of material gathered since it was founded in the 1920s but it remains largely inaccessible, held on film or videotape and managed to serve the needs of programme-makers within the BBC. This project forms part of the BBC Archive Strategy that aims to ‘open up’ the archives' assets to education and research in the coming years.

Chronicle makes part of that archive available to UK higher and further education by digitising news and current affairs programmes from the BBC Northern Ireland’s vaults. This gives teachers, students and researchers the chance to explore and immerse themselves in the events over an important period (1963-1976) of Northern Ireland’s history, delivering a rich and contextual experience from a political, historical and cultural perspective – but not before questions were asked about how to select and organise the challenging material. Doherty explains, “In the end, we went for the simplest and, in retrospect, the best approach. There was no selection, no ‘screening’, no attempt to impose a structure on it, or give meaning to it. The entire BBC Northern Ireland news archive from 1963 to 1976 will be made available to students, teachers and researchers in completely unmediated form.”

Students and researchers can access the television footage online along with web-based tools allowing it to be searched, viewed and annotated.

The Chronicle project has been shaped by an academic steering group made up of scholars from participating institutions (University of Westminster, Queen’s University Belfast, the University of Ulster, St Mary’s University College and Royal Holloway University of London) who reviewed the academic value of the project as it developed. They have incorporated the resources into everyday use within specific courses from day one.

The launch of the resource in April 2012 marked the start of a new turning point in collaboration between the BBC and JISC, as the two organisations signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to support the promotion of their common purposes, especially with regard to education, learning and culture – after several years of informal collaboration between the two organisations.

Signed by Caroline Thomson, BBC chief operating officer, and JISC’s executive secretary, Professor Martyn Harrow at New Broadcasting House and managed by a joint steering committee, the MOU will enable the two organisations to develop their joint interest in encouraging the creation and use of a wide range of audio visual and cultural assets.

Doherty says, “The average student is aged about 21, so that events from the early period of the Troubles are as remote to them as the Blitz is to people of my generation. What they think they know about the Troubles comes from what they have seen on television. It soon becomes clear to them however, that the Northern Ireland situation is about much more
than backward sectarianism, and Chronicle is already being used to help students
appreciate its complexity.”

“There are libraries full of scholarly material attempting to make sense of the Troubles, but our emphasis is on working with primary source material in unmediated form, that is, without anyone else to ‘tell me what it means’.

“Those of us based in London are lucky to have ready access to the National Archives at Kew, and the wonderful CAIN site at the University of Ulster allows us online access to primary sources from the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland.

“Now Chronicle gives us the same type of access to primary audio-visual material on the unfolding, sometimes horrifying story of the Troubles, as they happened.”
Read a longer version of Martin Doherty’s opinion on the archive.