The second phase of the online British Pathé news archive has been so popular that the web server is struggling to keep up with demand.Version 2 is the update of the archive that now includes 12 million still images as well as 3,500 hours of news reel footage. Archive material is free for educational use, with a series of fees for commercial organisations.
From 1900 to 1970, British Pathé News recorded almost every aspect of British life including politics, fashion, sport and entertainment.
Peter Fydler, director of marketing for the ITN archive, has been the architect of the project. He began exploring funding possibilities in 1999.
"This project could never have existed without the National Lottery because there is no commercial justification for it," he said.
An investment of £2 million was needed to establish the archive, half of which was eventually paid for with lottery funding and half by ITN, the UK commercial broadcaster. Sales from the site now cover day-to-day running costs.
Based in Cambridge, UK, a team of 50 staff worked for nearly four years to create the online archive, painstakingly converting newsreel footage to digital video format. It took the team around 20 hours to process one hour of film, and a further eight hours to catalogue each hour of footage.
Once the footage had been digitised, the process for creating still images was much faster - creating three images per second.
The new version has attracted coverage on many major news sites around the world. Current traffic on the site has far exceeded expectation, recently recording around 20,000 visitors in a period from midnight to 2am UK time.
"Archives are often very closed off," said My Fydler.
"Before the web site, visitors would have to make an appointment to visit the archive in London and we only ever had a few hundred users each month.
"But just in the first month of the web site we had one million visitors."
Popular searches include The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, but the clip of the Titanic - which is believed to be the only surviving footage of the doomed ocean liner - is the most popular download.
See also:
http://www.britishpathe.com
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