Following on from a three-year£2.3m digitisation project, news reels, story packages and stills will be amde available to staff and students at Newsfilm Online (www.nfo.ac.uk).
The initiative is backed by the British Universities Film & Video Council, ITN and the Joint Information Systems Committee.
Content can be downloaded for use in classes and lectures or as part of research projects. The resource will include news stories, unreleased content, single subject documentaries and unedited footage, plus 25,000 items of supporting content, such as scripts and running orders.
Footage will include reports of the Wall Street crash in 1929, the Queen's coronation in 1953 and the miners' strike in 1984.
Dr Richard Howells, a director at King's College London, believes the new service will be invaluable to scholars and researchers. “Newsfilm to date has been an underused resource, partly due to its relative inaccessibility,” he said.
“The beauty of Newsfilm Online is that it delivers the content for viewing on the researcher's own PC. It's a hugely welcome step for all researchers of visual culture, especially with the growing recognition of the importance of visual as opposed to simply verbal evidence today.”
Newsfilm online is aailable for subscription only to UK Further Education and Higher Education institutions.
Before the online service was launched, newsfilm footage was only available within the tape and film archives of ITN and Reuters Television.
The general public will also be allowed limited access to the online archive. The online service was created and is hosted by the Edina national data centre at the University of Edinburgh.
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