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News Sources: AudioVisual News Services

Discover digital, print and microfilm news resources

In addition to resources such as newspapers, wires and magazines, you might want to use news materials in other formats, such as news broadcasts.  

You can use the resources below to view current news coverage and also archive coverage, which provides insights into the political and social landscape of the times.

A selection of the key news-related audiovisual services are outlined below.  

 

Key Resources

BoB is an off-air recording and media archive service. This scheduling service allows University staff and students to record programmes which will be broadcast over the next seven days, as well as retrieving programmes from the last 30 days of recorded channels. 

The requestor will receive the programme after broadcast as an FLV file that they can watch in a web page, in the same way as iPlayer. BoB stores the recorded TV and radio programmes in the archive and holds them indefinitely for all users. 

The archive currently offers over 1 million TV and radio programmes covering all genres; that number is set to rise as more and more universities join BoB.  


With BoB you can record programmes, watch programmes from the archive, create clips, search for programmes coming up in the next seven days by title or keyword, compile your favourite shows into playlists and share with others (including embedding links to broadcasts or clips within their VLE).

BoB includes over 10 foreign language channels, including French, German and Italian. You can browse or search within the BoB archive to find content related to news or current affairs.

You can access the BoB help pages here. The service also offers some video tutorials.

The British Cartoon Archive (BCA) is a national collection of socio-political cartoons from British newspapers and magazines, plus comic strips, newspaper cuttings, books and magazines. The collection of artwork dates back to 1904. The physical library, archive and exhibition gallery are based at the University of Kent's Templeman Library.

 

Digital images of the cartoons are available via the BCA online catalogue and can be used for teaching and research purposes.

 

The political cartoons and satirical sketches are a useful insight into the political and social issues of the time and can complement your printed news research sources.

British Pathé Online Archive is a freely accessible resource. British Pathé was once a dominant feature of the British cinema experience, renowned for first-class reporting and an informative yet uniquely entertaining style. It is now considered to be the finest newsreel archive in existence. Spanning the years from 1896 to 1976, the collection includes footage - not only from Britain, but from around the globe - of major events, famous faces, fashion trends, travel, sport and culture. The archive is particularly strong in its coverage of the First and Second World Wars.

In 2014 the archive uploaded its entire collection of 85,000 historic films, in high resolution, to its YouTube channel. This unprecedented release of vintage news reports and cinemagazines was part of a drive to make the archive more accessible to viewers all over the world.  You can search the collections via the British Pathe website or on YouTube.

A service delivered to the UK higher and further education community via the Alexander Street platform in association with Jisc, bringing more than 100,000 videos, images, and sound recordings to your screen.

Use the Advanced search screen for precise searching. As well as entering key words to find matching news reports, you can search for news reports for specific people and historical events.  specify people, events etc. You can restrict your search to,particular news publishers, e.g. ITV News and you can also specify the audiovisual format you require, e.g. audio, text, video. 

 

 

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