An exciting new Wildfilm History Archive will be coming to Special Collections in the University of Bristol Library, thanks to a grant from the Wellcome Trust.
Here’s the archive as it is now, all boxed up in storage. We’ll be unpacking, exploring and eventually making the contents accessible.
The Wildfilm History Project will officially start on the 1st April 2019 and run for two years. The project will catalogue, conserve and make available a rich, diverse and important collection of wildlife filmmaking materials which document the changing cultural context of wildlife film making and how it has shaped our historical, social and cultural understanding of the natural world, as well as the growing appreciation of conservation issues and the broad public understanding of science.
Key goals of the project will be to:
- Create a detailed catalogue of the wide range of materials contained within the archive, including some of the most important wildlife films of the last hundred years.
- Digitise and provide access to a prioritised selection of the archive and make this publicly available (where rights allow) through the University’s Digital Archival Management system.
- Ensure the physical and digital archive is preserved to enable long-term access for researchers and the wider public.
The University of Bristol is home to the Centre for Environmental Humanities and from our initial discussions with researchers from Bristol and more widely there is clearly already strong research and teaching interest in the archive, as well as support from outside agencies such as Wildscreen and the BBC Natural History Unit.
“This is terrific news. Working on a project with the BBC Natural History Unit for the past few years has reinforced my conviction that there’s significant research potential for the archive from humanities and social science perspectives. Visual resources are highly valued not just by environmental and animal historians like me, but by the entire scholarly community working in the environmental humanities and the environmental social sciences. Until now, though, insufficient filmmaking materials have been available to support research.” Professor Peter Coates, School of Humanities, University of Bristol
For more details of the Wildfilm History Project please contact special-collections@bristol.ac.uk