InView: Moving images in the public sphere
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This 2-year project run by the British Film Institute (BFI) has provided access to 600 hours of digitised archive video, documents and associated resources for the enhancement of learning, teaching and research within the areas of the arts and humanities. Much of the content selected had never previously been available for general academic use.
Executive Summary
The project (InView) ran from April 2007 until March 2009 and sought to deliver content that would illustrate how some of the key social, political and economic issues in Britain had been represented, expressed and articulated through moving image media forms. The project has delivered a contrasting range of film and video content that has been assembled from currently dispersed collections, to create a unique resource to serve to a broad audience and serving the specific needs of Higher and Further Education and the wider learning, teaching and research community.
Efficient and economic resource consumption throughout the course of the project resulted in a significant underspending. This enabled the BFI to propose extending the range of moving image material that could be made available. JISC warmly supported the proposal and BFI subsequently concluded an agreement with Fremantle Media that allowed the project to serve up to 200 hours of television current affairs material, thus extending the range and type of moving image material made available through InView. The total volume of moving image material that will be served by BFI InView, by the end of September 2009, will amount to approximately 1,000 hours, or 67 percent greater than the original project target.
InView delivers to an exclusive academic audience digitised moving image material drawn from the holdings of the BFI National Archive. The material selected for the project sought to illustrate how some of the issues that helped to shape contemporary Britain had been depicted through the mediums of film and television. For too long academic access to such moving image resources had been difficult, and even though that has been changing in recent years, the unique approach taken by InView has been to bring together moving image material derived from a diversity of ownership sources, and to facilitate access to material that, in some instances, would not otherwise have been available for serious academic study. The unifying approach has been to serve the varied materials through a single website. The project was built as a partnership between several content owners and it has been this element that has enabled differing perspectives to be assembled, each of which, potentially, has its own story to tell.
The report provides details about the:
- project background
- aims and objectives
- methodologies adopted to ensure that the assets were delivered in good quality, and to the agreed specification
- licensing issues