At DHC we are fortunate to hold many hours of film and video footage featuring Dorset places, events and people form yesteryear. Much of this fantastic history is on formats we no longer have the equipment to play. And the pool of people with the expertise and equipment to transfer original formats to digital is shrinking. So we were delighted to be able to recently digitise over 120 at-risk items of video and film.
The video formats were digitised by a local company, and we took the cinefilm to our friends at Hampshire Archives to transfer in their digitisation studio.
Aside from the technical difficulties, audio-visual material brings another challenge. Unlike paper, you cannot easily flick through to find out what a film or video is about. We are wholly reliant on the information provided on the item and details of where it came from. In some instances, this information is incomplete, misleading or completely missing. One such case was a film labelled “A Terribly Nice Place” in the Christchurch Borough Council collection.
Having assumed this related to Christchurch, Dorset we were surprised to find we did not recognise the landscape and buildings portrayed in the film. The end credits revealed this was a promotional film for (you guessed it!) Christchurch, New Zealand! The archives team in Christchurch, NZ were delighted to receive a copy of the film, especially as it showed many buildings that were destroyed in the devastating earthquake of 2011.
A huge thank you to you for sharing this footage. Such a shame it doesn’t have sound, but it’s a fascinating picture of our city at that period of time – particularly when so many of those buildings have now gone with the 2010-2011 earthquakes. Thanks again for reaching out – we really appreciate it!
Among the films there was a collection from local film enthusiast Edward Mapplesden-Young who recorded local events, wildlife and visits to local attractions.
Mr Mapplesden-Young’s films include scenes from the model village ‘Tucktonia’ near Christchurch. This clip shows a variety of London landmarks represented in miniature!
In the Dorset County Council collection we have some staff training films. One of these, “Have a nice day, dear” was a commercially produced health and safety training film from the 1970s. You can watch a copy of this on YouTube. Based on the antics in this film it is a wonder anyone, particularly women, survived the 1970s!
The next step for the digitised files is to upload them into our digital repository system, Preservica. This allows us to preserve digital files with confidence that they won’t be corrupted, and we can migrate them to more appropriate formats if necessary. Then we can also make them available for people to watch in our searchroom. As more funding becomes available we hope to digitise even more of these precious films so they are accessible for generations to come.