The Newsfilm Online project, managed by BUFVC and part funded by JISC, is
launching a new website in April 2006. Before its release, the design tem is
running a preliminary study of the new interface for the site. These
sessions will ask participants to try out the new inteface and provide
feedback that will be used to tune the website for the April release. As
enthusiasts in media, communications and cultural studies, we invite you to
take a sneak preview and participate in a feedback session for the new NfO
website for accessing news media from the 20th Century. More information
about the project is at the end of this email.

We are looking for researchers, students, lecturers - all who are interested
in the history of media production and who make educational use of a rich
multimedia gateway to news and media content. The study and feedback will
take place between the 26th and 29th of January 2007. You will be ionvited
for approximately one hour to try out the new system and talk with us about
your take on it. Participant informaiton will remain strictly confidential;
any comments used in any reports will be anonymised. We will announce
location details soon, but it will be in a central London location.

If you would like to participate, please contact
[log in to unmask] with your name and email address where we
can contact you. To help finad a representative group of participants,
please also tell us about where media fits into your student or professional
work: 
	a) Are you a student, academic or research? (in what area?)
	b) How does the use of news film relate to your work?
	c) What is an example of how you have used news films, or other media, in
the past for these activities?

Max Wilson
Usability Manager
Newsfilm Online Interface Project
http://mspace.fm/projects/nfo


About Newsfilm Online

Newsfilm Online is planned to be one of the most exciting resources to be
offered to Higher and Further Education in the UK. 3,000 hours of television
news and cinema newsreels, taken from the huge collection of the ITN/Reuters
archive, is to be made available online in high quality format for teaching,
learning and research. Newsfilm Online will be a gateway of unmatched
richness to nearly one hundred years of news, from the 1910s to the present day

Newsfilm Online - research, replay, redesign

Newsfilm Online is an academic resource with the added dynamic of moving
pictures and sounds. Content will be downloadable, allowing the user to edit
material to suit their needs. It is to be made available under an 'in
perpetuity' licence meaning that these newsfilms can be embedded in UK
Higher and Further Education for years to come.

Coming in 2007

Newsfilm Online will be released as a resource for the UK Higher and Further
Education community in April 2007. It will be supported by an extensive
database, with clear and comprehensible searching. 450,000 pages of newsfilm
bulletin scripts are also being digitised and will be available as part of
Newsfilm Online. Newsfilm Online will open up new means for learning and
teaching and create new research opportunities across many subjects
disciplines. Newsfilm Online will help change the way we use moving images
in education.

What's available now

This 'demonstrator' web site is making some fifty news clips (approximately
one hour of material) freely available for downloading to all users. These
clips are arranged by theme and decade, and we welcome your comments on any
of these. We hope to add more clips to the site in due course. The main
delivery of 3,000 hours will be in 2007. Go to http://newsfilm.bufvc.ac.uk/.

What is Newsfilm Online

Newsfilm Online is managed by the British Universities Film and Video
Council ( BUFVC). We are a representative organisation supporting the use of
moving images and related media in higher and further education and
research. Among our many resources are the British Universities Newsreels
Database (BUND), the Television & Radio Index for Learning and Teaching
(TRILT) and an Off-Air Recording Back-Up Service. The BUFVC is part-funded
by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).