JISC

Overview

NewsFilm Online will deliver up to 60,000 segmented encodings, totalling 3,000 hours and associated materials from the archives of ITN and Reuters television, which includes several key cinema newsreels. Delivery of 60,000 segmented encodings, totalling some 3,000 hours from the archives of ITN and Reuters Television – including some of the most significant events of the past century such as the Crystal Palace fire (1936) to the first interview with Nelson Mandela (1961), from the battle of Newport Bridge (1975) to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales (1997) are all included. The rationale is to digitise the broadest possible range of material to ensure relevance across a whole range of academic disciplines.

Users will be able to process, search and download news clips and some scripts.

The project

The 20th and 21st centuries will be represented in 3,000 hours of newsreel footage, digitised by the British Universities Film & Video Council (BUFVC). Drawn from the archives of ITN (1955 to date) and Reuters (1896 to date) Television, both of whom are partners in the project, an enormous range of news stories will be made available online to UK further and higher education, enhancing and enriching opportunities for learning and teaching. Newsfilm Online not only represents a unique grouping of material but delivers innovative clear and comprehensible searching.

Newsfilm Online will allow users to download and manipulate news broadcasts on a wide range of themes, reflecting epochal events through contemporaneous media reports. Although the material clearly benefits historians and media students, the project’s rationale has been to digitise the broadest possible range to ensure relevance across a whole range of academic disciplines. Footage of ‘vox pops’ and football matches, for example, allow analysis of changing fashions or the behaviour of crowds. The resource will also be conducive to adoption of new methodologies for research and citation. Users will be able to embed clips in virtual learning environments or PowerPoint presentations and can ‘quote’ from the source material in essays just as they would quote from a printed resource.

The content

The process

Underscoring the digitisation process is the need to create digital sub-masters at the highest practical level in terms of bit-rate encoding. Newsfilm Online is using a rate of 8 megabits per second (Mbps), comfortably into commercial DVD quality. The aim has been to make the digital surrogates future-proof by achieving the highest rates possible within the project’s timeframe. The BUFVC is also using a process known as ‘video fuzzing’ which masks copyright-protected material in order to sidestep potentially difficult rights issues. Metadata vocabularies, taken from the NewsCodes designed by the IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council), are being used to provide commonsense subject codes and keywords as a finding aid to the material. Nevertheless, Jeff Hulbert of the BUFVC is keen to promote the ‘broad-brush’ nature of the material and the unpredictable types of learning the interface will support: ‘None of this (metadata) will replace what I think is an essential requirement for anybody looking at this material, which is to be curious and develop flights of fancy as much as finely targeted search mechanisms.’