News Film Online

News Film Online is the latest educational resource to bloom from the JISC digitisation programme. It is the result of a collaboration between JISC, ITN Source, British Universities Film and Video Council and EDINA.

The online news archive service offers more than 3,000 hours of news footage and archive film reels. The material runs from the 1910 funeral of Edward VII right up to reports of the 2007 racist bullying on reality TV show Big Brother.

Despite JISC spending £2m on the project, the news material it makes available to scholars is only a fraction of what ITN Source actually holds. And much of the footage seems to be of the more obscure episodes of recent history, although this has its own charm and value. For researchers looking for rare and unique material, it makes News Film Online all the more valuable. What’s more, it is free to academic institutions until 2012.

First impressions are of an accessible interface. A timeline bar stretches across the homepage, nicely using representative fonts for each decade, and thumbnails link to footage of events related by a shared date in the It Happened Today section.

The Browse Subjects section breaks the various parts of the site down into areas such as Arts, Culture & Entertainment; Crime, Law & Justice; and Disaster & Accident. A simple keyword search field is ready and waiting, as are links to conduct a more specific search elsewhere on the site.

Footage that foxes
For even quicker access, the It Happened Today area links to a batch of stories that all occurred on the same day and are available within the archives. It is a nice touch to suggest new footage each day and a useful tool to pique the interest of the casual browser. Unfortunately, as there is no initial information as to what each story is actually about, the impact is rather lost. Even rolling a cursor over a thumbnail image brings up a default message of “thumbnail of something that happened today”. This kind of glitch could be easily fixed.

Conducting a basic search brings up a listings page with summaries under each heading. They appear to be ranked with most recent first, and my attempts to sort by oldest first or collection instead were fruitless. Sorting by title was more effective.

Once you have chosen a film, the page displays a valuable amount of bibliographic information, such as broadcast date, film duration and a short description. A chronological summary of the events in the film is listed underneath, which can be quite handy given that various parts of the footage may be blacked out and muted to comply with copyright restrictions.

News Film Online offers the option of emailing the various pieces of catalogue material, but when I tried to send one particular item I ended up receiving a whole batch of unrelated material in return. What’s more, this information was riddled with spelling mistakes, which is unfortunate. Where the errors originate from is unclear (possibly the original source material), but it’s a shame, reflecting unfairly on the better elements of the site.

On a more positive note, at the foot of the page is a nice option to view a series of static shots from the film, and as you can choose the frequency with which these appear this can act as a handy storyboard creation tool.

Another search, this time for Thatcher, miners and Scargill, revealed fairly accurate coverage. But rather than film specifically about Britain’s first female prime minister or the formidable boss of the miner’s union, the returned material consisted of in-depth footage about the people and communities affected by the strike. The revealing, forgotten film is where the real value of News Film Online becomes apparent.

Later, after another unsuccessful search, the top result offered a fascinating 18-minute report (listed in the summary as a 28-minute clip) on the killing of ex-government minister Ian Gow by the IRA. It wasn’t what I was looking for (Thatcher quits/resigns/resignation) but I was pleased to stumble across this intriguing report.

A more reliable way of improving results is to choose the browse by subject option. It opens up the site and gives a better feel for what is hidden away. Topics are categorised broadly at first such as by Arts, Culture & Entertainment. In the case of Crime, Law & Justice a number of subdivisions open up, such as organised crime, war crime, corporate crime and so on. This way in feels a far more developed aspect of the site, and unless you have a specific date in mind with a query, it will probably afford a more enriching experience.

What is clear is that with a little patience and some trial and error to get around the bugs, searchers will eventually find what they’re looking for.

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