Part of the AHRB Centre for British Film and Television Studies, the British Artists' Film and Video Study Collection concentrates on the history of artists' film and video in Britain.
The History of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama research project (1999-2004) operated under the aegis of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at Oxford. It has in many ways pioneered the developing discipline of Performance Reception. It has done this by documenting as comprehensively as possible all performances worldwide of Greek and Roman drama and their adaptations between the Renaissance and the present, while hand-in-hand with that also exploring ways of interpreting those findings and that material.
The aim has been to make the University of Essex Collection of Latin American Art (UECLAA) available as a fully illustrated online catalogue. We began by developing a database that would facilitate management of the collection, integrating the full illustrated catalogue with mailing lists, contact and biographical details for artists, details of copyright agreements and other reports forms (records of donation etc), and information about the current location of a work of art etc.
TV Times is now the only record of many programmes shown on ITV, and particularly of those that no longer exist. TV Times exists in a relatively complete form in only two sources: the British Library and British Film Institute. The project was designed to commision the British Library to produce a microfiche version of their holdings (supplemented, it transpired, by editions from a private source located by teh research team); to digitise these; and then to extract the programme listing information into a searchable database.
The Mitchell and Kenyon collection has substantially challenged the traditional view of early cinema in that it has shifted the emphasis to exhibition and audience response away from film production and technique. The Collection has provided empirical evidence that the spread and exploitation of cinema in the first decade of the twentieth century outside the South East basis was primarily undertaken by itinerant showmen.
Between 1953, and 1999 when it closed its film department, Arts Council England commissioned or participated in the production of 485 films, which recorded all aspects of - mainly contemporary British - art. The subject matter, length and format of the films are as varied as they are eclectic. Moreover, because of the Council’s liberal attitude to sponsorship, and the creative freedom their commissions offered, they also attracted some of the best film-makers in the UK. Indeed, some of them provide a unique record of a partnership between the Arts Council, artists and film-makers.
The core aim of the British Universities Newsreel Scripts Project was to digitise and add some 80,000 cinema newsreel documents, together with other enhancements, to the existing British Universities Newsreel Database (BUND). These were recognised of documents of high value to researchers into history and the media, and they had been almost completely inaccessbile to academic researchers. The project integrated these documents with existing newsreel data and related resources to create a conte-rich and powerful online research tool.
The project will research the history and output of British cinemagazines, weekly or monthly information films produced between 1918 and 1982. It will explore the ways in which the cinemagazine was used to construct images and reinforce values of British life, particularly films for overseas distribution. The project will add details of 25,000 cinemagazine stories to the BUFVC’s existing British Universities Newsreel Database (BUND), creating a unified record of over 185,000 items. The project will also produce a Researcher’s Guide to British Cinemagazines publication.
The ICTGuides project is now incorporated within this project (arts-humanities.net).
Two developments gave birth to the ICTGuides database: an increase in the use of ICT in arts and humanities research and an awareness that information on how ICT is used in arts-humanities research is not readily available online. The resulting disparity was largely seen to have detrimental effects on ICT-based scholarship as sharing computational expertise among scholars is a precursor to promoting innovation within the field.
In 2001 the Film and TV Studies Department at the University of East Anglia was awarded a substantial grant under the AHRB’s Resource Enhancement Scheme. There are two main strands of the project, each of which is designed to encourage wider use of a major resource in the study of British film history through the creation of online materials.