Moving History - a guide to UK film and television archives in the public sector

 

 

 
Elizabethan Express
Elizabethan Express
Elizabethan Express
Elizabethan Express
Elizabethan Express
Elizabethan Express
Elizabethan Express

Related Organisations

Other film related collections and resources

Other archive sites and resources

Links

Related Organisations

AMIA - Association of Moving Image Archivists www.amianet.org
The Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) is a non-profit professional association established to advance the field of moving image archiving by fostering cooperation among individuals and organizations concerned with the collection, description, preservation, exhibition and use of moving image materials.

ADM-HEA - Art Design & Media Subject Centre www.adm.heacademy.ac.uk
The Subject Centre for Art, Design, Media (ADM) is part of the Higher Education Academy (HEA) established by the Higher Education Funding Councils for England, Northern Ireland, Scotland & Wales to promote high quality learning and teaching in subject communities.

Arts and Humanities Research Council http://www.ahrc.ac.uk
The AHRC funds research and postgraduate study within the UK's higher education institutions. In addition, on behalf of the Higher Education Funding Council for England, it provides funding for museums, galleries and collections that are based in, or attached to, higher education institutions in England.

British Universities Film and Video Council www.bufvc.ac.uk
The BUFVC is a representative body which promotes the production, study and use of film and related media in higher education and research. The website provides access to useful resources including the Researchers Guide Online, the Moving Image Gateway, the British Universities Newsreel Database, and the Television and Radio Index for Learning and Teaching, amongst others.

Domitor www.domitor.org/
An international association dedicated to the study of early cinema.

FIAF - International Federation of Film Archives www.fiafnet.org
The International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) brings together institutions dedicated to rescuing films both as cultural heritage and as historical documents.

FIAT - The International Federation of Television Archives www.fiatifta.org
A professional Association established to provide a means for co-operation amongst television archives, multimedia and audiovisual archives and libraries concerned with the collection, preservation and exploitation of moving image and recorded sound materials and associated documentation, still image and other materials.

Film Archives UK www.filmarchives.org.uk
Film Archives UK (formerly known as Film Archive Forum) represents the UK's public sector film and television archives - caring for the UK's moving image heritage. The website includes details of the member archives, a statement of principles, listings of online databases and videos available from the archives, news and links pages.

Focal International www.focalint.org
The Federation of Commercial Audiovisual Libraries International Ltd, is a not-for-profit professional trade association providing excellent networking and marketing opportunities for people in the footage, stills and audio archive content industry, and giving users easy access to over 300 members worldwide.

IAMHIST - The International Association for Media and History www.iamhist.org
An association of professional film and television broadcasters, scholars, and others who are passionately concerned about film, radio, television and their relations to history.

London's Screen Archives - filmlondon.org.uk/networks/lsa
London's Screen Archives is a regional network supporting organisations in London that hold collections of moving image material. It helps researchers and the public find these collections and tries to ensure the preservation of important material made in or about the city.

University of Brighton - www.brighton.ac.uk
The University of Brighton is home to the Screen Archive South East and hosts this website.


Other film and television related collections and resources

BBC Collections www.bbc.co.uk/archive/collections.shtml
The BBC has millions of hours worth of radio and television output and sound effects. It also archives key documents, commercial and sheet music. Archive access vary according to requirements and purpose. Public and research access to BBC film, television and audio material is generally available through the British Film Institute research viewing service and the British Library Sound Archive.

BBC Nation on Film - www.bbc.co.uk/nationonfilm
Nation On Film is a site containing online archive video clips from the 20th century. It includes old newsreels, documentaries, as well as home movies. These videos have been drawn from a variety of sources including the Northern Region Film and Television Archive and the BBC's own archive.

BBC/Open University Nation on Film website - www.open2.net/nationonfilm/index.html
A companion website to the BBC/Open University TV series 'Nation on Film'. The site explores issues raised in the series, looking at "the untold story of how film both recorded and contributed to social change in the 20th century".

BBC Scotland on Film - www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/history/scotlandonfilm/index.shtml
"An evocative collection of online clips from film, television and radio". The archive film extracts are courtesy of Scottish Screen Archive - Scotland's Moving Image Collection.

Bill Douglas Centre www.billdouglas.org
The Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture is the University of Exeter's newest research initiative in the Arts and Humanities. The Centre contains both a public museum and an academic research centre, housing one of Britain's largest public collections of books, prints, artifacts and ephemera relating to the history and prehistory of cinema.

Broadcasters' Audience Research Board www.barb.co.uk
BARB (Broadcasters' Audience Research Board) is the primary provider of television audience measurement in the UK and are responsible for providing estimates of the number of people watching television. This includes which channels and programmes are being watched, at what time, and the type of people who are watching at any one time.

British Artists' Film and Video Study Collection - www.bftv.ac.uk/avantgarde/
The British Artists' Film and Video Study Collection, funded by the AHRB Centre for British Film and Television Studies, houses a large collection of videotapes, documentation and visual material by British artists, which is accessible to researchers. A major project of the collection has been the establishmant of an extensive online database.

British Pathé - www.britishpathe.com
This site allows free access to preview items online from the entire 3500 hour British Pathé Film Archive which covers news, sport, social history and entertainment from 1896 to 1970.

JISC Media Hub jiscmediahub.ac.uk/
JISC Media Hub provides search results for video, image and audio resources from many different collections. It offers a wealth of digital image, video and audio collections accessible from a single interface. The content is aimed at UK Further and Higher Education Institutions and offers free-at-the-point-of-use images, licensed for educational and research use.

Film Institute of Ireland, Irish Film Archive www.irishfilm.ie/archive
The Irish film Archive acquires, preserves and makes permanently accessible Ireland's film and audiovisual heritage. Its holdings include an extensive collection of film and magnetic tape, film stills and posters, a paper archive, film equipment and memorabilia.

Mitchell & Kenyon film collection www.bfi.org.uk/features/mk
For around seventy years, 800 rolls of early nitrate film sat in sealed barrels in the basement of a shop. Now miraculously rediscovered and undergoing restoration, this amazing visual record of everyday life in Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century is the most exciting film discovery of recent times and promises to radically transform British film history. These web pages include information about the collection being preserved and restored by the bfi, and about the BBC series 'The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon'. The National Fairground Archive (see below), is working closely with bfi Collections, to undertake to research into the collection.

Moving Image Gateway bufvc.ac.uk/gateway/
The Moving Image Gateway (MIG) is a service that collects together websites that relate to moving images and sound and their use in higher and further education. The sites are classified by academic discipline, and collected within the four main categories of Arts & Humanities, Bio-Medical, Social Sciences and Science & Technology.

The National Archives Focus On Film www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/focuson/film/
Focus on Film is a resource for teachers and learners where you can view clips from twentieth century films ranging from life in Britain to conflict in Vietnam.

National Fairground Archive www.shef.ac.uk/nfa
Housed in the Main Library, The National Fairground Archive (NFA) is a unique collection of photographic, printed, manuscript and audiovisual material covering all aspects of the culture of traveling showpeople, their organisation as a community, their social history and everyday life; and the artifacts and machinery of fairgrounds. The National Fairground Archive is also working closely with the bfi, to undertake major research into the Mitchell and Kenyon film collection.

National Media Museum www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk
The National Media Museum is the new name for the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television. They exist to “Engage, inspire and educate by promoting an understanding and appreciation of photography, film, television, radio and the web.

News on Screen bufvc.ac.uk/newsonscreen
The world’s leading resource for the study of newsreels and cinemagazines under the care of the British Universities Film & Video Council (BUFVC). The site contains a database of 180,000 cinemagazine & newsreel stories (1910-83) linked to production documents and films.

Northern Ireland Screen www.northernirelandscreen.co.uk
The Northern Ireland Film and Television Commission is an integrated agency for the development of the film industry and film culture in Northern Ireland. The Commission’s Digital Film Archive (DFA) is an access resource (not available over the internet) for researchers, students, historians, and anyone who has an interest in moving images in Northern Ireland. The DFA contains 55 hours of moving images about Northern Ireland from 1897-2000.  There are 389 items covering drama, animation, documentaries, news, newsreel, amateur and actuality film.

Ofcom www.ofcom.org.uk
Ofcom is the independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries, with responsibilities across television, radio, telecommunications and wireless communications services. Amongst many other roles, Ofcom conduct quantitative and qualitative research on television and radio broadcasting in the commercial and non-commercial sectors.

RGO- Researcher's Guide Online - media.bufvc.ac.uk/RGO/index.php
The RGO database has entries on almost 550 film, television, radio and related documentation collections in the United Kingdom and Ireland. It features national and regional archives as well stockshot libraries and collections held by local authorities, museums, institutions of further and higher education, industrial companies and private individuals.

SCRAN - www.scran.ac.uk
SCRAN is a history and culture website providing access to images, sounds, movies and learning resources and contains over one million records from museums, galleries and archives. Schools, higher education, libraries, museums and home users subscribe can to SCRAN for a fee.

Screenonline - www.screenonline.org.uk
Aimed at schools and libraries, the new Screenonline site aims to bring to life the history of British film and television, with hundreds of hours of digitised video, alongside thousands of stills, posters, production designs, press and publicity materials, unpublished scripts, personal papers, recorded interviews with filmmakers and actors, and interactive timelines.

The Ulster Folk and Transport Museum www.nmni.com/uftm
The Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, part of the National Museums of Northern Ireland, has a growing collections of moving images on film and video. In collaboration with Northern Ireland Screen the museum is an access point to the "Digital Film Archive" that provides, via a computer station, 70 hours of digitised moving images about Northern Ireland from 1897-2000.

Other archive sites and resources

A2A - Access to Archives www.a2a.org.uk
The A2A database contains catalogues describing archives held throughout England and dating from the 900s to the present day. These archives are cared for in local record offices and libraries, universities, museums and national and specialist institutions across England, where they are made available to the public.

AIM25 www.aim25.ac.uk
AIM25 provides electronic access to collection level descriptions of the archives of over fifty higher education institutions and learned societies within the greater London area.

Archives Hub - www.archiveshub.ac.uk
A national gateway to descriptions of archives in UK universities and colleges.

ARCHON www.archon.nationalarchives.gov.uk
An electronic directory of local archival repositories in the UK and abroad and a portal to archival resources

British Library Sound Archive sounds.bl.uk/
One of the largest sound archives in the world. The Sound Archive holds over a million discs, 185,000 tapes, and many other sound and video recordings. The collections come from all over the world and cover the entire range of recorded sound from music, drama and literature, to oral history and wildlife sounds.

British Library Online Gallery www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/index.html
The British Library's online gallery- view and hear images and sounds from the British Library's world-renowned collections of maps, prints and drawings, photographs, documents and sound recordings.

Cyfrwng www.cyfrwng.com
Cyfrwng is an interdisciplinary journal published annually by University of Wales Press. The Cyfrwng project provides a forum for the presentation of research and scholarly discussion concerning the media in Wales, namely film, television, new media, radio, journalism, theatre and performance studies.

The Mass Observation Archive www.sussex.ac.uk/library/massobs
This Archive specialises in material about everyday life in Britain. It contains papers generated by the original Mass-Observation social research organisation (1937 to early 1950s), and newer material collected continuously since the 1981.

The National Archives www.nationalarchives.gov.uk
The National Archives of England, Wales and the United Kingdom has one of the largest archival collections in the world, spanning 1000 years of British history, from Domesday Book of 1086 to government papers recently released to the public.

NRA - The National Register of Archives www.nra.nationalarchives.gov.uk/nra/
A resource for those seeking information on the nature and location of records relating to British history

Unesco Archives Portal - www.unesco.org/webworld/portal_archives/
With the Archives Portal, UNESCO provides a single interactive access point to information for archivists and users of archives worldwide. Visitors to the UNESCO Archives Portal can browse through pre-established categories or search for specific words.

Untold London - www.untoldlondon.org.uk/
This site searches for the histories that relate to all the cultures of London. The site focuses on London museums, but also look at archives, galleries and the history work of communities themselves.