The Library has a trial for the Cinema Image Gallery during March and April. Cinema Image Gallery is an image database covering the history of film-making through a wide range of high-quality images of films in production. It includes more than 152,000 images, from the latter part of the 19th century to the beginning of the 21st century. It also offers an extensive TV stills archive featuring classic and modern television.

The database also offers links to reviews and other articles, some in full text, and biographies. If you have any comments on this database during the trial period please forward them to e.lawes@ucl.ac.uk

The Wellcome Film collection has now been added to Film & Sound Online. The 212 films in the collection, which illustrate the use of film as a communication tool in the medical sciences, were previously only available to researchers visiting the Wellcome Institute.

The earliest footage is of archaeological digs in the Sudan, at Jebel Moya, featuring the founder, Sir Henry Wellcome himself (A day at Gebel Moya, season 1912-13), as well as more jaunty corporate fare about the business of running a pharmaceutical company (Looking Around, The Story of the Wellcome Foundation).

Many of the films were originally made for professional audiences such as doctors, surgeons, nurses and students of medicine, so be prepared for some “hands-on” footage of clinical procedures and actual operations.

Public information films from 1945-2006 are now available to view online at the National Archives website. Joining with the Central Office of Information (COI) to celebrate their 60th Anniversary, the National Archives have featured a selection of some of the most memorable and influential COI public information films that cover some fasinating events from Britain’s post-war history. The collection is particularly strong in coverage of films from the 1970s, including the famous ‘Charley Says’ and ‘Green Cross Code’ campaigns.

SnagFilms is an online library of 550 full length documentaries, directed by a range of filmmakers from established directors to first time filmmakers. Films can be watched, or ‘snagged’ (by means of a widget) and put on any website to be watched for free. The library includes films from the Public Broadcasting Service, Arts Alliance America and National Geographic among others. The documentary list can be browsed by topic such as environment, health, history, politics, or by title.

Find Any Film is funded by the UK Film Council and aims to become ‘the UK’s most comprehensive film-watching search engine’, and ‘like a Google for films’. The site claims to find when, where and how a film is available in the UK, legally and across all formats – in cinemas, on TV (tracking over 300 channels), DVD & Blu-ray sale or rental, download, or streaming – ranging from early cinema to new releases. Search by title or browse by genre. The site includes trailers (where available) and synopses. An ‘Alert Me’ feature will automatically send out an alert when a chosen film, no matter how obscure, becomes available in the UK in a chosen format.

Left field cinema provides an alternative perspective on mainstream films and analysis of masterpieces of world cinema, independent film and the works of some of the most influential filmmakers in the form of articles, reviews and podcasts. Describing itself as ‘film recommendation and analysis’ as opposed to film criticism, each episode belongs to a subseries, such as ‘Misunderstood modern cinema’, ‘British masterpiece’, or ‘Asian avant-garde’. It is also possible to browse the site by film genre or a-z list of film titles.

This is a reminder that the library has access to Film & Sound Online, a database of film, video and sound material. Collections include:

• Royal Mail Film Classics: founded in 1933 the GPO Film Unit produced one of the finest British collections of documentary, public information, animation and industrial film ever to come from a single UK source.
• The Imperial War Museum: the IWM film and video collection is recognised as one of the most important moving image resources for the study of all aspects of the major conflicts in which Britain was involved in the 20th Century.
• The Amber Film Collective, which documented working class communities in the north-east of England from the 1960s onwards. Amber Films was one of the first independent, regional film co-operatives.
• Educational and Television Films Ltd: documentaries and feature films relating to the former Soviet Union, Communist China, the European Eastern block, Chile and Cuba.
• Films of Scotland: one of the most coherent local and national film collections in the UK, Films of Scotland charts the changing face of Scotland from the 1930s to 1982.

All films can be downloaded for research use.

Each week, the Facets Free Film Portal spotlights a different set of their favourite films, interviews, arts programmes and documentaries which are available free on the web. The current picks include an interview with Alfred Hitchcock, D.W. Griffith’s 1915 classic silent movie Birth of a nation, and a documentary on Edward Kienholz. 

Facets Multi-Media is a Chicago based non-profit organisation with a mission to preserve, present and distribute independent, world and classic film.

The library is now subscribed to NewsFilm Online, a new service which allows playback and downloading of over 3000 hours of selected films from the ITN / Reuters archives. The films can be browsed by decade (1910s – 2000s) or by subject, including the arts, education, the environment, politics, religion, and science. News stories include Christo wrapping the Reichstag (Channel 4 News, 1995), In-a-gadda-da-vida at Tate Britain (Channel 4 News, 2004), and Tilda Swinton sleeping at the Serpentine Gallery (ITV News, 1995).

Log in to Newsfilm Online via the UK Federation link, select UCL from the drop down list, and log in with your usual network username and password. It can also be accessed via the a-z list of library databases.

The British Artists’ Moving Image Database covers experimental and avant-garde film, video art, artists’ television, gallery-based installations and other works that use moving image and audio-visual multimedia technologies, made by British and British-based artists.

The database provides information on several thousand works and identifies the holdings of public and academic collections, archives, distributors and dealers, their location and conditions of access.

The database is updated regularly as new information is received about works and collections. It can be searched by artist or title, or browsed by collection. Collections include the Arts Council, the BFI, the ICA, Lux, Tate and others.