Serving the nation in the digital
era
Uploaded 12 November 1999 | 7,044 words
An attachment to history is certainly a mark of British culture, possibly confirmed most tellingly by the previous (Conservative) government calling its Ministry of Culture, the Department of National Heritage. Collecting documents and artefacts has been a singular element in the UK for many years, not least at the British Film Institute. Sixty six years in existence, the BFI has amassed vast collections of material and data in that time, and now as the Information Society emerges this is beginning to accrue commercial as well as cultural value. But even more important, digital and network technologies are transforming the ability of public sector organisations like the BFI to make archival materials available more widely to those who have paid for their care and conservation over many years - the taxpayers.
The British Film Institute has the remit to encourage an understanding of film and television, and to conserve the film and television heritage. In 1995 the BFI decided to seek to take its vast collections (275,000 film titles and 200,000 television programmes, as well as related stills, papers, designs, publicity materials) alongside its world class filmographic database SIFT (Summary of Information on Film and Television), and follow the digital trail. The obstacles to making these collections easily accessible in the analogue world have been many. The most obvious problem was the logistic requirements of making copies (even on video) available to researchers, let alone members of the public, other than through cinema screenings. Furthermore, it has always been necessary to protect the interests of the copyright owners, and even with video there has always been a fear of illegal copying.
Digital and network technologies provide the opportunity for new ways of thinking about access as well as suggesting new forms of educational practice. The initial goal of BFI Online was simple but also pragmatic: to provide wide reference access to all film and television collections across the UK using digital and network technologies. By 1997 with a new focus on access and education at the BFI following the Labour government's careful restructuring of the public bodies supporting the arts in Britain, this project had taken on a new sense of urgency. If properly funded it could provide access across the UK to a large proportion of the nation's film collections, and it could become a key factor in developing educational resources incorporating film material to be delivered through the emerging public networks.
Two pilots were commissioned - one jointly with the university sector, as described in Tony Pearson's paper on the PADS project at the University of Glasgow, and one, within the BFI, to test the uses in a range of other locations, the BFI's National Library Reading Room, the National Film Theatre and the Broadway Media Centre in Nottingham. The key areas of enquiry in both pilots were:
- technological - a range of software was deployed to compare and contrast operational solutions
- copyright - to secure the understanding of the rights holders of how such a service would be delivered and assess the likely problems in providing a full service
- to secure a broadly defined pedagogy - in order to test out the user interface and content design with different groups and with different modalities of use.
The target audiences have been differentiated across the two pilots not least by the location of the access points. In the BFI National Library access is available to the researcher and serious film buff (indeed membership of the Library is a prerequisite to use); at the National Film Theatre members of the public use the collection alongside knowledgeable cineastes; at the Broadway Media Centre in Nottingham the general public work alongside those in educational workshops or at conferences or in evening class groups.
The material used was sourced from the National Film and Television Archive and the BFI National Library. Permission for use was granted by all rights holders and, taking a pragmatic approach, only sought at this time from European companies: Carlton International and Canal Plus for the film material (between them they control in excess of 70% of the rights to British feature film heritage), and the BBC, Channel Four and Granada plus a number of smaller companies for the television material. In addition, the Performers' Alliance - the musicians, writers and actors unions - agreed to the free use of the material in this pilot service.
Copyright
Copyright issues have been critical in the pilots and of necessity securing solutions to such problems as emerge will be fundamental to the viability all future service provision. For the BFI, observance of copyright remains fundamental to its very operations, and clearly with these pilots BFI online wanted to ensure complete compliance with the intellectual property regime. The BFI has good relationships within the British film and television industry and were able to use these to the full to benefit the pilot service.
At the same time it should be noted that the BFI has consistently lobbied for changes in the intellectual property regime. Over the last 4 years, new legislative provisions for copyright in the information society have been formulated. In the European Union a Green Paper was published in 1995, a Draft Directive in 1998, followed by a further, more restrictive draft in 1999, incorporating amendments requested by the European Parliament. Although much of the most intensive lobbying was undertaken by the music industry, which saw itself under threat from digital piracy, the film and television industries, and those who contribute to production, have taken an ever keener interest in these issues. As these proposals would affect operations at all levels the BFI has argued for the continuation (and even extension) of its right to use the materials in its collections to further its educational aims. BFI online has been determined to protect copyright in those things that we own, notably the SIFT database, and although some educational aspirations have been impeded by the difficulty (and expense) of clearing film extracts for educational materials, the complexity of copyright issues and the need for all interests to be fairly met is recognised.
Technology
The technology has been a second critical area for the project. When the original BFI Online scheme was devised in early 1996, after discussions with a range of companies the BFI forged a relationship with IBM (and British Telecom) to prepare its application for funding from the Millennium Commission. IBM offered a digital library capability which would have allowed BFI Online, with our other partners BT, to have rolled out quickly a service across the UK. When this application was turned down because it was 'insufficiently distinctive' the BFI maintained the technology link and sought to establish a basic technological competence and range of knowledge in developing an online service which we believed in time would achieve our basic objective: nationwide access to the Collections. The pilot was based on software that IBM developed but which was never marketed commercially - Grand Central Media (GCM). This offered a low cost means to prove the concept and learn about users' needs with any service designed to provide reference access to a body of film , television and related material. However, the pace of change has been rapid in the area of digital moving image delivery as well as in the development of digital library software. In terms of networks the original planning focused on using MPEG-1 encoded material over an Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) network. Today, of course, we are witnessing the roll out of a panoply of new services which will undoubtedly transform the field even further, both economically and technically.
The diagram below shows the basic process we have followed to move from content selection through to service delivery:
Illustration 1 Content and the Users
The user interface of GCM is relatively old fashioned, as can be seen from the illustrations below, but it does offer a fairly intuitive entry point to the range of materials to which access can be provided (particularly for those familiar with a Wintel-based Personal Computer file directory). The facility is available to show frame stills, key images from the film, stills and text as well as the starting point for digitised extracts from the films or television programmes. With some computer skills the user can display and follow the script of the film against the play out of the video stream, and in the singular case of Hitchcock's Blackmail can compare extracts of the same scene in the silent and sound versions of the film.
Illustration 2
The material selected for inclusion in the pilot was chosen pragmatically: there was a continuing interest in the work of Powell and Pressburger: the London Films output (owned by Carlton) had been the subject of an earlier arrangement to digitise a number of stills and to restore some of the key Korda films: the Carry On... material represented a more recent moment in British film history. At the same time, Granada had offered the BFI financial support to digitise material from their London Weekend Television output, while the BBC material was of a sufficient significance to necessitate its inclusion in any pilot. Latterly British material from the silent era and more early (British) Hitchcock material has been included to support conferences in Nottingham and wider BFI projects.
Illustration 3
There was a connecting narrative behind the selection of material - British cinema history - but in the 6 months to September 1999 it was decided to make this explicit through the user interface. A timeline of British cinema has been developed to give coherence to our offer, and soon this will be mirrored by a timeline of British television. This entry point now sits alongside the search engine to give users different ways of interrogating the growing collection of material.
User needs must be defined at the outset of any project but it is necessary for the process of refinement to be iterative, for actual use to redefine the template and the service offer to the extent that this is feasible technically. It is important to note that BFI Online are finding difficulty satisfying all user requirements across all sites. It is salutary that a pilot service should confirm the problematic resolution of many of the questions being asked at the outset. Users in public spaces have a preference for a "bespoke" and programmed service, while serious researchers have asked for in depth reference material (which could never be met through a pilot service). We have also begun to become much more attuned to the different pedagogical demands across different educational uses.
Anecdotes tell many tales about usage and the users - the lady with her knitting and cup of tea at the kiosk in the NFT watching the first episode of Upstairs, Downstairs; the user in the BFI National Library asking for material on Iranian cinema; the student in the Library using the material on Hitchcock's Blackmail and the coming of sound to help complete his MA dissertation. The comments on our user sheets indicating satisfaction and enthusiasm for the development of the service though sometimes mixed with frustration at the complexity of the interface. Practically, it is evident that many users of the NFT kiosk are 'PC challenged' and the need for robustness of equipment has been proven several times. The ease with which people are able to open new windows is a fundamental design problem which would have been resolved in any commercial application of IBM's Grand Central Media. This problem has to be lived with. We are still agnostic about the relative merits of the film extract against the full length feature, but from a pragmatic point of view the extract has proved easier to clear. We have found that the greatest use value of the extract is an educational one where you are trying to illustrate some conceptual point rather than showing a lost classic from the archive to a new audience.
Further interesting developments are in train in the next year as we move to develop a hybrid version of BFI Online for Northern Ireland. This will tell the history of Northern Ireland in the twentieth century through the media of film and television, as well as the history of film and TV there. Development is underway on a hybrid internet/intranet service which works around the significant obstacle of the high cost of bandwidth by avoiding the network and placing material on a hard drive at each centre.
Futures
The central objective with this project is to improve the educational use of the BFI collections in line with our core mission: to improve the understanding of the arts of film and television, and to enable a wide audience to gain access to footage from British history which reflects the changing mores of the nations. However, achieving this objective this enters the realm of politics, resources, and the art of the possible. This of course is part and parcel of the operation of any public body in the 1990s - resource deprivation leads to pragmatic approaches while educational needs require a dynamism and clarity that is hard to achieve.
On the public funds front the BFI will continue to seek funds from various new central government initiatives - along with many other public organisations with potential content to be digitised - and to make it accessible in public centres throughout the UK. The informal educational potential of such a service is not easily measurable but we believe it is important to remind people continually of the seventh art and its contemporary and historical importance. The Northern Ireland project emerged from a much larger bid for monies to link up the Regional Film Archives in the UK and offer a window on the history of each region and nation in the twentieth century, but only in Northern Ireland did we receive money.
In the formal education sector many interesting opportunities are emerging. Clearly the project with the Joint Information Systems Committee and the universities has proved the potential of a moving image service - even though the pedagogic lessons were not that useful for long term planning. The possibilities that are associated with the National Grid for Learning, the University of Industry and the extension of the public network capability to incorporate further education institutions as well as libraries, are substantial. Value added services and the operation of subject gateways then become interesting avenues which can be developed.
But it is pedagogy which remains the troubling unresolved issue which in our view needs concerted attention. Should content be curriculum driven, relate to curated stories and seasons, or be encapsulations of notions of identity and heritage? These are issues of knowledge and cultural value alongside the more practical, but equally complicated issues of commercial value, and easier mechanisms for copyright clearance. Related issues in the wider sphere include the development of new cataloguing techniques adequate to the digital environment and across media forms (the Dublin Core has been trialled in both pilots), while for the BFI, as we approach a development crossroads, we need to consider the very nature of the sort of organisation we wish to be in the next century. In a world which looks likely to be a voracious consumer of entertainment and information, and in which the potential of e-commerce may well be realised, like all public sector organisations sitting on the treasure troves of the past, we face a future of great opportunity but also one requiring significant investment to realise the highest use value in this new digital age.
This article is a fuller version of the keynote paper presented at the INFOG99 Conference, Treasury Theatre, East Melbourne, Friday 16 July 1999.
