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Free News Content For Education 'Usage'

Picture shows: Trevor McDonald meeting Nelson Mandela

Over 3,000 hours of historic news footage from ITN’s archive division, ITN Source, have been made available to further and higher education institutes in the UK, giving educators and students cost-free access to a century of video material.

www.nfo.ac.uk

A century of news now available free to educators and learners

The NewsFilm Online service, www.nfo.ac.uk, featuring ITN and Reuters content, forms part of a £22 million digitisation programme, funded by JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) to promote the innovative use of ICT in education and research. All disciplines across further and higher education will have access to the archive for research, teaching and learning.

One of the key elements of the archive licence agreement is that users from subscribing educational institutions who access the material can download clips and edit them to create their own user content for projects - a first for this type of material.

Educators and scholars at subscribing institutions will have cost-free access to the archive, which starts with black-and-white film footage of the funeral of King Edward VII in 1910 and ends with a colour news clip of Jade Goody in a racial bullying scandal in the Big Brother house in 2007. Other significant events spanning the past century include the Suez crisis in 1956, the first interview with Nelson Mandela in 1961, landing on the moon in 1969 and the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997. Users can view whole newsreels and download them for use in virtual learning environments.

The NewsFilm Online archive is the result of a collaboration between ITN Source, the British Universities Film and Video Council (BUFVC), JISC and EDINA, a JISC national data centre. The process of digitising newsreels from the 20th and 21st Century has been undertaken by the BUFVC, which selected the NewsFilm Online material from over 1.5 million hours of archive content.

Channel 4 News’ Jon Snow, who makes many appearances on NewsFilm Online, said: "NewsFilm Online is an exciting and fascinating initiative: a resource which will provide educators and students with a myriad of windows into British and world history over the past century.

“This project exemplifies the benefits of partnership between education and industry. JISC, the BUFVC and ITN Source should be commended for their contribution to this breakthrough in UK education."

JISC Chair, Professor Sir Ron Cooke, said: “The JISC digitisation programme demonstrates e-resourcing at its best. It is unlocking a wealth of material - some of it previously hard-to-access – and making it available to users regardless of time and location. The NewsFilm Online project is just one of many that will enable the UK higher and further education community to dip into the history, culture and landscape of the UK and beyond. The BUFVC rationale with the Newsfilm Online project has been to digitise the broadest possible range of footage in order to appeal to a wide variety of academic disciplines.”

Mark Wood, Chief Executive of ITN, added: “We’re delighted to give students and educators access to this great video content, which brings the events of the past century to life. The NewsFilm initiative is yet another example of the rapidly expanding use of video content at all levels of education.”

Posted by Will Carleton
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