The BUFVC Moving Image Gateway includes nearly 1,500 websites relating to video, multimedia and sound materials. These have been subdivided into over 40 subject areas. To suggest new entries or  amendments, please contact us by email or telephone or visit  the Gateway at  http://bufvc.ac.uk/gateway/

Canal Educatif
Offering educational videos for free is the laudable aim of this website, which has resources in three subject areas: History of Art, Economics, and Science & Innovation. The videos in the History of Arts section are available in French and English versions. The site aims for quality over quantity, presenting a number of HD video essays, each of which, for the History of Art section, focuses on a single painting, including Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors and Liberty Leading the People by Delacroix. Material for Economics and Science is currently only available in French. Some of the films can also be bought as DVDs.

Faulkner at Virginia: An Audio Archive
During his time as writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia, from 1957 to 1958, William Faulkner gave two addresses, read from eight of his works, and answered over 1400 questions from audiences made up of various groups, ranging from UVA students and faculty members to interested local citizens. These sessions were recorded on reel-to-reel tape recorder and now over 28 hours worth of material from the archives have been digitised, catalogued, transcribed and made freely available in QuickTime format. Users can browse or search the collection by keyword but anyone seriously interested in exploring the collection will benefit from reading the contextual essay which gives a detailed account of Faulkner’s residence at UVA, the background to the recordings, information on audio quality (which is understandably uneven given the limitations of the technology of the time), transcription methodology, links to essays, photographs, cartoons and a selection of letters from the Faulkner collections at the UVA library.

A curated Clips section presents a selection of highlights from the collection, consisting of over 230 of Faulkner’s responses to audience questions. Most of the questions refer specifically to the novels (nicely illustrated with images of first editions), but Faulkner also has interesting things to say about his career (including writing in Hollywood for Howard Hawks), his opinions of other writers, including James Joyce, Albert Camus and J.D. Salinger and his views on the South and the Civil Rights Movement.

Historiana
This award-winning resource was created in 2011 by EUROCLIO, the European Association of History Educators. It offers a wealth of digitised material from museums, archives and other heritage institutes and is primarily aimed at KS4+ history students and their teachers, but has also been used for cross-curricular teaching, in subjects such as Geography, and some of the material would be of interest to those in Further and Higher Education. The impetus behind the site’s creation was to promote ‘the acquisition of cross-border historical knowledge and the development of critical thinking’: in other words to give students the knowledge and critical apparatus to compare the way in which historical events and developments have been presented in different ways by different nations, showing different national and political perspectives. The site is easy to navigate and structured to guide teachers though a variety of approaches to learning, by themes, locations and people. A Sources page gives access to digitised posters, paintings, maps, drawings and cartoons as well as a number of Audiovisual sources, which includes a number of clips of Key persons in the development of European integration, including Winston Churchill, Konrad Adenauer, Alcide De Gasperi and Joseph Bech.

Radio Prague
The official international broadcasting station of the Czech republic offers its programmes as podcasts in six different languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Czech and Russian. The station’s website features a wide range of content, covering current affairs, business, arts, culture, history and sport. The podcasts are available to be downloaded in mp3 format or can be streamed and archived material goes back as far as 2005. A typical example is this interview with head of the Czech National Film Archive, Michael Bregant, in which he explains how during the Communist era staff had to resort to subterfuge to hide and preserve valuable film materials from the authorities. The podcasts are accompanied by summaries, full transcripts and illustrated with stills and photographs. The History section of the archive is particularly interesting with sections devoted to 1968, the communist era, World War II and Czech-German relations. There is also some interesting contextual material in the form of illustrated essays, including a history of Czech radio and a detailed look at the history of Radio Prague.

Sign Media
This online learning tool is for deaf media professionals who wish to improve their written English skills and is available in English, Italian and Austrian sign languages. Funded with support from the European Commission’s Lifelong Learning Programme, the resource guides the user through a series of interactive video tasks, based around a fictional scenario involving working as a production manager for a soap opera ‘Beautiful Days’. The learning activities are based on real media documentation used in television production, including risk assessments, call sheets, treatments and scripts, thus enabling deaf users to develop language skills that can be applied directly to a career in media production.