MSc student James Taylor has been working for a year at the British Film Institute (BFI) National Archive, on a project called InView, which provides online access to a large amount of audiovisual material to higher education in the UK. The material is collected under five themes: Education; Environment; Health; Immigration, Race & Equality; and Industry & Economy. It draws on collections ranging from silent film on social issues, cinema newsreels, films made by state corporations and the Central office of Information through to BBC current affairs programmes, party political broadcasts and parliamentary recordings. All the material is streamable or downloadable, at http://www.bfi.org.uk/inview.

James writes: My role in the project has been selecting, cataloguing and writing about the material featured. This has given me an opportunity to write about some of the sub-themes featured under the Environment heading: Energy; Farming & Forestry; Pollution & the Environment; and Sustainability & Conservation. I have also written contextual pieces about many of the films featured including a 1938 film promoting national savings (that touches on issues of community land ownership), a 1968 interview with Tariq Ali, a 1977 Labour Conference debate on nuclear weapons, and a 1987 piece promoting nuclear power sponsored by the UK Atomic Energy Authority.

Other material accessible through the site of possible interest to a human ecology audience includes documentaries on E.F.Schumacher, ozone depletion, global warming, organic farming, the 1984 miners’ strike, Anglo-Irish relations, poor housing conditions and much more. Wider public access to much of the featured material will follow in the next few years through the project ‘A Portrait of Britain,’ and a range of other material can already be accessed electronically in schools and public libraries through BFI Screenonline: http://www.screenoline.org.uk. The UK has a range of public film and video archives allowing onsite viewing of materials at http://bufvc.ac.uk/faf/.