From Gorbachev to global warming: education experts choose images for JISC Collections archive

Education experts have taken the first steps towards building a JISC Collections archive containing over 500 hours of film and 56,000 photos documenting modern history.

The expert panel consists of e-learning advisors, librarians, academics and image specialists who collectively represent over a hundred years of experience of working with digital images in education, They have chosen 11 collections from ten suppliers to form an archive for students and academics which will be available from next July.

Following £2.5 million in funding from JISC and a competitive procurement process, JISC Collections has licensed the collections for at least 25 years as part of the Digital Images for Education initiative ¹.

The images are copyright-cleared for use in education so they can be reproduced in course packs, virtual learning environments, e-portfolios and other multimedia works.

The selected images bring to life our shared history from a local, UK and international perspectives to support teaching and lifelong learning.

Film clips will be available – from Gorbachev's accession to power in the Soviet Union in 1985 to the financial crisis of 2009, and including powerful raw footage of the 9/11 attacks, as well as coverage of key issues such as deforestation and global warming.

Photographs range from nineteenth-century life in the Scottish Highlands to contemporary youth culture.

Noel Williams, professor of communication at Sheffield Hallam University, commented: "JISC has created what is pretty much a unique resource, exciting in its scope and potential. It touches on the interests of a wide range of subject areas, and contains images which will be of value to both teachers and researchers, and useful in all educational contexts – from colleges through to the highest levels of HE."

The collection will include materials from academic and not-for-profit organisations such as the Royal Geographic Society and the University of Brighton, alongside commercial agencies such as Associated Press, ITN Source and Getty Images.

Lorraine Estelle, CEO of JISC Collections, said: "The new images purchased as part of the Digital Images for Education initiative bring to life our history and capture, in particular, the key events of the past 25 years – from the death of Princess Diana to the election of Barack Obama. The images will complement our existing and highly popular collections – Newsfilm Online, Film and Sound Online and the Education Image Gallery – to provide the UK education community with a world class library of still and moving images covering the last 150 years."

Between now and February, around a terabyte of data will be delivered each month from the content suppliers, which converted to paper would mean the use of 500,000 trees.

Each of the images has to be checked for quality, and extensive metadata tagging is required to optimise searching and browsing facilities. New features will also be built into the destination collections to ensure the tags are helpful for both curators and users of the archive.