British Pathe Film Archive

The British Pathe Film Archive bills itself as the first digital news archive, and the Web site allows you to preview items from the 3500 hours of digital film (most of whish consists of newsreels, produced from 1910-1970). The digitization was funded via the Lottery Funded New Opportunities Fund, a U.K. national endowment, although British Pathe is/was a private company. Professional use of the site requires payment of a fee, but the previews are offered for free.

There are three types of resolution offered, the free clips and 128 kb/s and the presentation and Web publishing resolutions at 512 kb/s. The lower-quality versions are available in QuickTime and Windows media pLayer. Presumably there are higher-quality digitizations from which these versions are drawn, but this is not explained. There is no user-visible metadata of any kind.

The simple search leaves something to be desired. I searched for "Churchill," which would seem to be a common search on this type of material, and while it returned 1217 hits the top one offered is "Butterfly Farm," the description of which is "Butterfly farmer develops a new skill - preserving dead butterflies to use them as decorations." The top of the entry contains a date--presumably the date of film release?--and the timestamp of the video. To download the video you must complete the information requested, including country of residence and purpose of use. (It is free for UK residents) There are 16 themes offered for searching in a more sophisticated manner, although the subjects were counterintuitive, for me at least: they are more geared to light entertainment than to news. This is not explained anywhere, nor is there any info given on the context of teh newsreel: who saw them, what purpose they served.

The site implies that all of the Pathe film has been digitized, but this is not explicit stated: nor is there any info given as to selection criteria, if there was any, restoration processes and decisions, etc. The rights can be presumed to still be held by Pathe, in some kind of joint agreement with the National Lottery to make the preview public. There is usage information and restrictions available on the FAQ page. It is an interesting arrangement, that of the access being public to one nation's citizens while commercial for other. It is clearly unenforceable, at least as far as I can tell. But the provision of lower-quality digital film to all for free, which has the added advantage of serving as a tool for selling commercial-quality film to professional, has promise. It has added to the store of information available via the Web while still protecting the company's right to make money from their product. But what of the long-term sustainability of such a project? It is impossible to say without more information than is provided, unfortunately.