Documenting the History of the British Film Institute: An Online Resource
Lead Research Organisation:
Queen Mary University of London
Department Name: History
Abstract
The British Film Institute (BFI) celebrates its 75th anniversary in 2008, making it the longest established state-funded arts organisation in the UK. It has an annual turnover of £30,000,000. It is responsible for the nation's principal film and television archive; it holds an incomparable collection of film and TV-related books, periodicals and other documents; it screens over 2000 films a year at its refurbished Southbank premises in London, where it also provides online access to gems from the archive collection; and it publishes the monthly film magazine Sight and Sound and an acclaimed collection of films on DVD. Historically, it pioneered film and media education in this country and made a massive contribution to British film-making through the activities of its Production Board from the early 1950s onwards, supporting films ranging from Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson's Momma Don't Allow (1956) to Terence Davies's Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988).
This distinguished history is not widely known to the general public / or even to the BFI itself, which has not kept its records in good order. Since 2004, an AHRC-funded project led by the applicant has been researching the BFI's history in detail (including creating some order in the 1000+ boxes of documents) and the scholarly outcome will appear in book form in 2008. The project under the AHRC Knowledge Transfer scheme makes the BFI a partner organisation in a plan to make the knowledge accumulated in the course of the research available in a totally different way / as an instrument for the partner itself to understand more of its own history and as a means of communication with a far larger public than would be reached by a scholarly monograph, taking advantage of advances in internet technology.
The database created under the Knowledge Transfer scheme will contain written, photographic and audiovisual materials relating to the entire history of the BFI from its foundation onwards. Written documents will stretch from the report The Film in National Life, published in 1932, which led directly to the establishment of the organisation the following year, to the latest statements of BFI strategy and corporate planning. There will be a photo archive of BFI premises, staff and distinguished visitors; audio and video interviews with former BFI staff and others who have shaped its destiny over the years; and film/TV/video material relating to the BFI. All in all we expect to be able to include: up to 6000 original textual documents; 2000 photographic images; 25 hours of edited video interviews; 10 hours of edited BFI historical footage; 10 hours of edited audio interviews; numerous graphs, charts and lists generated by the project team; and contextualising texts for the online resource.
The database will be compiled using the BFI's Artesia Asset Management system and an interface will be created to enable the contents to be accessed on line as an extension to the BFI's successful Screenonline information resource for British cinema, which currently receives over 800,000 page impressions per month.
This distinguished history is not widely known to the general public / or even to the BFI itself, which has not kept its records in good order. Since 2004, an AHRC-funded project led by the applicant has been researching the BFI's history in detail (including creating some order in the 1000+ boxes of documents) and the scholarly outcome will appear in book form in 2008. The project under the AHRC Knowledge Transfer scheme makes the BFI a partner organisation in a plan to make the knowledge accumulated in the course of the research available in a totally different way / as an instrument for the partner itself to understand more of its own history and as a means of communication with a far larger public than would be reached by a scholarly monograph, taking advantage of advances in internet technology.
The database created under the Knowledge Transfer scheme will contain written, photographic and audiovisual materials relating to the entire history of the BFI from its foundation onwards. Written documents will stretch from the report The Film in National Life, published in 1932, which led directly to the establishment of the organisation the following year, to the latest statements of BFI strategy and corporate planning. There will be a photo archive of BFI premises, staff and distinguished visitors; audio and video interviews with former BFI staff and others who have shaped its destiny over the years; and film/TV/video material relating to the BFI. All in all we expect to be able to include: up to 6000 original textual documents; 2000 photographic images; 25 hours of edited video interviews; 10 hours of edited BFI historical footage; 10 hours of edited audio interviews; numerous graphs, charts and lists generated by the project team; and contextualising texts for the online resource.
The database will be compiled using the BFI's Artesia Asset Management system and an interface will be created to enable the contents to be accessed on line as an extension to the BFI's successful Screenonline information resource for British cinema, which currently receives over 800,000 page impressions per month.
People |
ORCID iD |
| Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (Principal Investigator) |