The BUFVC Moving Image Gateway includes over 1,600 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, telephone or visit the Gateway at http://bufvc.ac.uk/gateway/

Harry Ransom Center Multimedia Page
The Harry Ransom Center is a library, archive and museum based at the University of Austin, Texas. Its mission is to advance the study of the arts and humanities by acquiring, preserving, and making accessible original cultural materials. Amongst its holdings are over 36 million literary manuscripts as well as a smaller collection of film and television materials. The centre’s multimedia page features an eclectic selection of videos, including talks by writers, features on aspects of conservation, and films about selected artefacts and objects held in the Center’s archives.

One of the Ransom Center’s most interesting online resources is the Mike Wallace Interview collection. Wallace was an American journalist noted for his direct interviewing style, whose programme ran from 1957 to 1960. He donated the show’s footage, on 16mm kinetoscope, to the Ransom Center in the 1960s, and it has now been digitised and made freely available to view. The interviews (five are audio only) also come with fully searchable transcripts. A wide range of notable personalities submitted themselves to Wallace’s probing, hard-hitting approach, including Henry Kissinger, Frank Lloyd Wright, Diana Barrymore, Jean Seberg, Gloria Swanson, Aldous Huxley, birth control campaigner Margaret Sanger and former head of the US Communist Party Earl Browder. Interviews with lesser known characters such as this encounter with Eldon Edwards, Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, provide a valuable insight into the times and a good example of Wallace’s tough approach.

Let’s Dissect
This teaching resource for secondary schools was developed by the University of Bristol and shows the heart, kidney, and digestive system of a pig. The resource consists of online interactive tutorials which are accompanied by videos. It can be used in the classroom as an accompaniment or an alternative to dissection. There are separate tutorials for teachers and students. The videos can be viewed separately here.

Pebble Mill Studios
This excellent resource documents the history of Pebble Mill Studios in Birmingham, from the building’s opening in 1971 to its demolition in 2005. The site features video interviews, stills and text about the history of the studios, with specially filmed contributions from directors, editors, producers, writers, camera operators, presenters and others. In the clip below, David Rudkin, who wrote the acclaimed Play for Today Penda’s Fen, talks about how the play was received.

Searchable Transmission lists give a chronology of drama broadcast from BBC Pebble Mill between 1972-200. The listings include drama series Thirty Minute Theatre, Playhouse and Play for Today, listing transmission date, writer, producer and director. The material is broadly arranged in three categories: ‘Building’, ‘Television’ and ‘Radio’. However, a slight caveat for users is that the content is presented in the form of a blog, so that entries are arranged chronologically, which can make searching difficult.
The site was created by Vanessa Jackson, who worked at Pebble Mill from 1987 to 2004. She is now is now Degree Leader in Television at Birmingham City University: the site is part of a research project to document programme making in the regions, and was been funded by Screen West Midlands. For copyright reasons no footage from the original BBC programmes is available.

Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics Video Library
The Perimeter Institute is a centre for scientific research, training and educational outreach in foundational theoretical physics, based in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Since 2007 the institute has been creating video recordings of its seminars, conference talks and outreach events and making them freely available on its website. Each video is accompanied by an abstract and classified according to its speaker and research area. Subjects include condensed matter, quantum fields and strings, mathematical physics, quantum gravity and cosmology. The seminars are also available to view on the PIRSA or Perimeter Institute Recorded Seminar Archive: a ‘a permanent, free, searchable, and citable archive of recorded seminars’. The seminars here are available in Windows Media, Flash, MP3, and PDF of slide or presentation materials.

Sisterhood and After: An Oral History of the Women’s Liberation Movement
This site is one of the outcomes of a Leverhulme funded research project which ran from March 2010 to March 2013. The project’s researchers interviewed 60 feminists who had been active in the Women’s Liberation movement in the UK in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. The aim of the project was to create an original and extensive oral history archive of the lives of feminist change-makers of the 1970s and 80s.
The site features interviews with women arranged around a number of themes, including Activism, Equality and Work, Education, Politics and Legislation, Race, Place and Nation and Sex, Love and Friendship. The audio clips on this site have been extracted from longer interviews which are available in their entirety at the British Library.
Other resources on the site include a Biographies page with profiles of prominent members of the British feminist movement, including academics, writers and broadcasters such as Beatrix Campbell, Sheila Rowbotham and Jenni Murray. An interactive Timeline begins in 1961 and charts the significant social and political events (and legislation) of the times alongside landmark episodes in the women’s movement. The material on this site is a fraction of what was recorded for the project: much more is available at the British Library.