Newsfilm Online is managed by the British Universities Film & Video Council (BUFVC) in partnership with the ITN Archive. Newsfilm Online will offer access to substantial quantities of television news content to users throughout UK higher and further education.
The news film will be delivered in downloadable form, meaning that users may retain and reuse copies long term under a sub-licence agreement. All of the ITN material encoded for Newsfilm Online will be made available to UK higher and further education ‘in perpetuity’.
The planned 3,000 hours of newsfilm content will be released as a resource for UK Higher and Further Education users in August 2008. This will compromise some 60,000 news items taken from the ITN and Reuters collections, covering some 100 years of cinema and television news reporting. This represents a small percentage of the estimated 130,000 hours of news currently held in the ITN/Reuters archive. Some 450,000 microfilm pages of ITN bulletin scripts are also being digitised.
The encoding standards for Newsfilm Online are based on those developed by the JISC’s Managing Agent and Advisory Service.
Each clip will be encoded in three versions: Windows Media Players at 768 Kbps, Apple QuickTime at 768 Kbps, and an MPEG-2 sub-master at a target data rate of 8 Mbps. The WMP and QT deliveries will be marked by a Digital Onscreen Graphic.
Newsfilm Online was preceded by a scoping study conducted by the BUFVC. This examined ITN\Reuters newsfilm from an educational perspective, and produced the recommendations for a full-scale project upon which Newsfilm Online is based.
From 1 August 2008 Newsfilm Online will offer access to film and television news content to users throughout UK higher and further education. The newsfilm will be delivered in downloadable form. For subscription information please visit JISC Collections.
"Newsfilm Online is going to be an invaluable resource"
