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Information About

Northern Region Film And Television Archive




The Northern Region Film and Television Archive (NRFTA) is a not-for-profit organisation which exists to collect, preserve and provide access to Film , Television and other moving image material related to the history of a region of England , which is defined as the Tees Valley area and the counties of Durham , Northumberland and Tyne And Wear .


HISTORY AND OVERVIEW

The NRFTA was founded in January 1998 as an unofficial consortium of four bodies which already held substantial . It is a member institution of the UK Film Archive Forum and the Association of Moving Image Archivists .


CURRENT OPERATIONS

The NRFTA operates from two sites, at the . The collection of master material is split between those two sites, but the eventual aim is to house the complete collection at Teesside , where suitable vault facilities are available and all of the permanent staff are now based. Viewing facilities for members of the public are available at Newcastle , but Preservation and cataloguing work no longer takes place there. As with any archive, the NRFTA undertakes three core activities.

  • Acquisition. There is no system of Legal Deposit for audiovisual media in the UK, and so moving image archives have to identify appropriate materials for preservation and persuade their owners to deposit them.

  • Preservation . Film , Magnetic Tape and Digital Optical Media are among the most technically complex of any archival medium to preserve for the long-term. NRFTA staff carry out this task through a combination of preserving original media and copying where this is necessary to prevent the loss of content.

  • Access. This includes dealing with viewing requests from individual researchers, organising public screenings and licensing material to Film and TV programme makers. Access work can also involve negotiating Copyright clearance and overcoming technical issues needed to provide high-quality access copies.


The NRFTA is funded from a combination of sources, including public money, revenue from commercial footage licensing to broadcasters (all other paid-for services are charged on a cost-covering basis) and 'in kind' contributions from its constituent organisations, principally the , and its permanent staff are all employees of the University Of Teesside .


THE COLLECTION

The collection policies of the English regional film archives are all broadly similar. They do not collect fictional feature films or TV programmes produced outside their regions and/or intended for network broadcast: this is the responsibility of the National Film And Television Archive . The NRFTA's collection consists mainly of regional TV news and regionally produced network output, industrial, promotional, educational and advertising films, and amateur film and video. Among its major collections are:

  • BBC regional news filmed location reports for the north-east and Cumbria , covering 1957-1991.

  • News, drama and documentary material produced by Tyne Tees Television , from 1956 to the mid-1990s.

  • The complete output of Turners, a Newcastle-based production unit which made industrial and educational films from 1947-1995.

  • The complete output of Trade Films, a Newcastle-based production unit which made campaigning films and videos for the trade union movement between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s.

  • The film and video collection of Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), produced by its corporate production unit based at the chemical works in Billingham , covering 1935-1992.

  • A collection of training and public information films made by the Durham Police Constabulary .

  • A collection of amateur film and video dating from 1928 to the present day.



NRFTA CURATORS


  • January 1998 to December 2000: Chris Galloway

  • December 2000 to 27 May 2001: Position vacant

  • 28 May 2001 to 18 November 2006 : Leo Enticknap

  • From 19 November 2006: Position vacant



EXTERNAL LINKS