Film, television and radio are resources which have been poorly used by scholars and only now are being drawn in to the corpus of sources valued in historical studies. Such studies may cross many disciplinary boundaries and these are not confined to the humanities. Scholars engaging with these media are therefore in need of accurate research tools to assist them in the early stages of their work.
The Researcher’s Guide to British Film and Television Collections was first compiled in a book by the British Universities Film & Video Council in 1981. It was a pioneering work which spawned the development of similar publications around the world.
In 2000 - 2001 with the assistance of the Research Support Libraries Programme, the underlying database of the Researcher’s Guide was extended to include radio and documentation collections related to broadcasting and cinema for access online by UK scholars.
The project started with a survey, MIRRDOC - Moving Image, Radio and Related Documentation Collections, which the BUFVC conducted in the autumn of 1999 to identify moving image-related print collections in the UK - collections of books, journals, posters, scripts, music scores, production stills, publicity stills, and other ephemera. The inclusion of radio collections was encouraged by a Radio History Symposium held at Bournemouth University in June 1999.
With the support of the RSLP, the BUFVC was to extend this initial survey and then provide online access to the information for the UK academic research community.
The RGO has now been released as a new specialist gateway which offers detailed information on almost 550 collections - their holdings, access facilities, cataloguing, online presence (including databases) and main contacts. The collections described are those held by national and regional film and television archives, television companies, radio stations, stockshot libraries, newsreel libraries, written archives and higher and further education institutions; as well as smaller collections held museums, local authorities, industrial companies and private individuals.
The RGO enables users to define searches by collection title, subject, index term and medium. Records have live e-mail and web links, where these have been supplied.
The plan for data improvement, concatenation and publication of the online guide involved the updating of all entries in the fifth (1997) edition of The Researcher’s Guide to British Film & Television Collections and those submitted under the MIRRDOC survey. The data was merged in a database designed to comply with the RSLP Collections Description Schema developed by the UK’s Office of Library Networking (UKOLN). A two-page data form was devised and information was collected via direct mailing, followed up by written and telephone reminders.
Online access required i) the development of a new database shell to accommodate the importation and publication of relevant fields, and ii) the design of web functionality and the construction of the database front-end.
The RGO will be updated frequently and live from the BUFVC’s premises in London.
The project Steering Group comprised the following external members:
The RGO Steering Group met twice; on 14 September and 19th December 2000.
The project commenced in May 2000. The Researcher’s Guide Online went live on Friday 20 April 2001.
The BUFVC has delivered this one-year project on schedule and has created one of the first Collections Description Schema compliant databases using XML. It has also established a methodology for continuous updating of the data giving the site long-term viability.
Jim Ballantyne
RGO Project Coordinator
Luis Carrasqueiro
Network Content Manager, BUFVC
Murray Weston
Director, BUFVC
RGO Contact
Sergio AngeliniTel: 020 7393 1500
Fax: 020 7393 1555
E-mail: rgo@bufvc.ac.uk
Content: Gill Davenport
Last updated 5 July 2002