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Finding Images

This guide aims to support staff and students in sourcing and using high quality still and moving images for teaching, learning and research.

Finding moving images

As with still images there are a multitude of fascinating online archives containing moving image footage for non-commercial use in research and teaching. Most of these are openly accessible online, others are available through the University of Birmingham's institutional subscription so you will need to search for these through Find It in order to obtain full access. The key moving image resource searchable through Find It is Box of Broadcasts below for details.

Remember wherever you source your moving images you must always use a sufficient acknowledgment - this should include the artist/author/director, the title of the work and the image source. See copyright and referencing your images tabs for more details.

Websites

  • British Council Film Collection
    A digitised and downloadable collection of short documentary films made by the British Council during the 1940s.
     
  • British Film Institute
    This site offers a wealth of information and resources about British film and TV.  Also available is online access to the catalogue of one of the world's largest research collections of materials on British (and international) cinema, and television
     
  • Luxonline
    Dedicated website on British video and film art containing an archive of works by film and video artists, including synopses, artist biographies, stills and streamed clips, in-depth features and essays on different artists who work with film and video.
     
  • PLAT
    Access to over 150 Spanish films online;
     
  • Scottish Screen Archive
    Scotland's national moving images collection. Over 1000 film clips and full films are available on the site along with a catalogue detailing all of the films available from Scottish Screen.
  • BBC Archive 
    Publicly available archive of selected highlights from the BBC over the last 75 years.
     
  • Imperial War Museum Archive
    IWM has managed a Film Archive from its very beginnings as an institution, and the film collection now covers all aspects of conflicts in which British, Commonwealth or former Empire countries have been involved since the start of the twentieth century.
     
  • National Film Preservation Foundation
    The National Film Preservation Foundation is the nonprofit organization created by the U.S. Congress to help save America's film heritage. We support activities nationwide that preserve American films and improve film access for study, education, and exhibition.

Box of Broadcasts BOB

How to access BOB 

Please enter University of Birmingham into 'Where Are You From?' section to login. Then enter your ADF username and password. This will then log you in.

BoB is an off-air recording and media archive service. This TV scheduling service allows you to record TV and radio programmes that are scheduled to be broadcast over the next seven days as well as retrieving programmes from the last seven days from a selected list of recorded channels.

After a programme is recorded users can stream a Flash video in a web page - in a similar way to BBC's iPlayer. BoB stores recorded TV and Radio programmes in an archive indefinitely for all users to enjoy. The archive currently offers over 45,000 TV and radio programmes covering all genres, and that number is set to rise as more further and higher education institutions join BoB.

To be able to save playlists and clips on your MyBob account it is recommended that you add your email address as a backup of any changes to the institutional authentication process.

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