It's been a great month so far and the project is gaining momentum.
After finding my feet - and holding a screening of The Work They Say is Mine at the Screenplay film festival - myself and founding member of the Archive Group Joanne Jamieson, set off to Glasgow on a fact finding visit to the Scottish Screen Archives. And what an enjoyable and worthwhile visit it was.
The Scottish Screen Archives is part of the National Library of Scotland and preserves over 100 years of Scottish history on film and video. The staff we met - Ruth Washbrook and Kay Foubister, were fantastic and very supportive of our project. In fact, they envisage using our project as a model to roll out nationally.
We talked about the legal framework we need to put in place before we can start accepting footage into our archive, copyright issues and the hardware and software we would need to host our collection online, as well as the building specifications to house the actual physical films.
We were happy to discover that because Scottish Screen Archives will be moving their premises to Kelvinhall in 2016, they are currently in the process of researching new equipment themselves. So, this is something that we can work on together.
In fact we'll be working with the Scottish Screen Archives quite a bit over the next few months to put in place a service level agreement between our organisations, which will enable us to send film to them for restoration and digitisation. In turn we will identify, catalogue and manage the Shetland archive footage, and make available material that otherwise would be lost. It's all part of partnership working.
While we were in Glasgow we also took some time to pop along the Bridgeton Library to see the BFI's Mediateque, as we plan to provide something similar in Heritage Centres around Shetland. The Mediateque has a suite of small booths, each offering users access to films otherwise unavailable to the public. If you're in Glasgow, and are in to film, it's certainly worth a visit. In the meantime you can find out more here....
