The BUFVC Moving Image Gateway includes over 1,200 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/

ChronoZoom
This is an open source, community collaboration between University College Berkeley, Moscow State University, and Microsoft Research that aims to cover – literally – life, the universe and everything, from the Big Bang to the present day. Chronozoom works dynamically, based as it is on zoomable interactive timelines, to create a visual sense of the immensity of time – 13.7 billion years of “big history” – in a way that would be impossible in a static timeline. Still in its early stages at present, the site is limited to timelines and exhibits, but as geologist Walter Alvarez explains in the introductory video, further content will be developed in the future.

Given the project’s ambitions, it is unsurprising that navigating the site can prove initially somewhat disorienting, but patient users will be rewarded with a powerful sense of the true scale of time over cosmic, geological, biological and social periods.

Deep Sky Videos
This series of videos about deep space is curated by astronomer Brady Haran, and features contributions from British and American astronomers. Much of the content is concerned with the Messier Catalogue, a set of astronomical objects catalogued by the French astronomer Charles Messier and includes this film about the Crab Nebula – the first object catalogued by Messier and given the number M1.

Other videos on the site look at technical aspects of filming deep space objects, famous astronomers, recent developments in astronomy, as well as a group of videos about telescopes.

Film Story
This website invites the user to explore the relationship between history and film and consists of a directory of films – divided into the categories ‘Feature Film”, “Documentary” and “Mini Series” – which can be explored via a search according to era, region and subject. Each film entry has a summary, basic credits and is tagged with a number of themes, which can be clicked through to show other films in the same category. The site’s home page is a map of the world which reveals how many films are available region by region.

Virtual Cell Animation Collection
Created by the Molecular & Cell Biology department at North Dakota University, this resource features animated sequences of nineteen molecular and cellular processes, supported by an educational module with captioned stills from the animation showing the key steps in the processes. Among the processes shown are mRNA splicing and processing, photosynthesis, protein recycling, meiosis, mitosis, insulin signalling and protein trafficking. Requires Flash.

Xeno Canto
This website, which has the support of a number of academic and birdwatching institutions, is a community database consisting of recordings of bird sounds from around the world. There are around 67,000 calls and songs from over 7,000 birds and the site’s search engine enables the user to search according to a variety of sonic criteria, including length, volume and pitch. All the sounds are classified by species, country and location, time, date, elevation and are assigned a unique catalogue number. The recordings appear under a Creative Commons licence and can be downloaded and used under the terms of that licence.