I am writing in response to your letter of 14 May requesting written evidence outlining the relationship of the British Film Institute to the Heritage Lottery fund, and our views on a number of issues.

1.  THE BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE

  The BFI is the UK agency with principal responsibility for the conservation of and promotion of learning about film and television. The BFI Collections encompass the range of materials which are needed to understand the place and importance of film and television within the political and cultural life of these islands through the twentieth century. Within ongoing resource constraints, the BFI conserves some 350,000 films and television programmes, seven million photographs, 30,000 posters and designs, some 200 special collections of company and personal papers, as well as 10,000 museum objects. These Collections are underpinned by a developing electronic filmographic database, SIFT (Summary of Information on Film and Television) which currently includes records of 590,000 films, 700,000 personalities and 150,000 organisations as well as related periodical references. We will soon be adding 750,000 subject references to this database as well as intellectual property rights information. The complementary educational and exhibition work of the BFI seeks to transform and make available this rich heritage for a range of audiences through a variety of different services across the UK.

  With the range of responsibilities carried out by the BFI and the burden of dealing with a technologically dynamic and relatively expensive art form, the creation of the Heritage Lottery Fund was warmly welcomed as a potential source of funds to transform the level of care which could be given to the Collections. For the first time the huge potential of Collections which had been amassed over a period of more than 60 years seemed to be within grasp. The BFI had never received sufficient resources to cope with an ever larger backlog of film material which had been rescued from permanent destruction as laboratories or film distributors sought to minimise the safety hazards associated with highly inflammable nitrate footage.

National Film and Television Archive

  Through the generosity of its principal benefactor, J. Paul Getty, the Institute had been able in the 1980s to build a state of art conservation centre at Berkhamsted. The Centre was awarded a Heritage Lottery Fund grant of £13.875 million in 1997 which will enable the BFI to identify and catalogue its unexamined collections of film and television, not only massively speeding up the existing long term programme of nitrate duplication but also allowing the BFI to tackle the problem of decomposing safety film for the first time. Overall this programme of additional work will ensure the long term survival of the collections and lead to increased access by putting the BFI in a position to take full advantage of the possibilities offered by digital technology.

  The virtue of film as a technology is that it has remained essentially unchanged for 100 years. Television, however, has been marked by rapid technological advance so that the rate of change in formats has proved problematic for archival purposes. The BFI has collected material in 405 line format which became obsolete after 1969, and through the 1970s collected television programmes on two inch quad tapes. These formats and the machines which run them are now obsolescent necessitating transfer of this Collection to a modern digital format. Again the award of the Heritage Lottery Fund grant will enable this transfer to happen.

  It is BFI policy, however, that preservation of our film and television heritage is meaningless without providing enhanced access to our collection. The BFI has been at the forefront in developing plans for the digitisation of Britain's film and television heritage so that these materials, which express the genius of the film community of these islands as well as representing our history in the twentieth century, can be made widely available using network technologies. The BFI was consulted by the Heritage Lottery Fund during its review of the use of HLF money for IT applications to widen access to the heritage. We expect to apply to the Heritage Lottery Fund at a later date when we have considered the results from pilot services that we are currently developing.

Museum of the Moving Image

  The BFI also runs the Museum of the Moving Image on London's South Bank—designed to provide an accessible and enjoyable introduction to the history of the development of moving image culture. The Museum utilises the BFI's collections to exemplify and illustrate different aspects of the growth of the twentieth century's most popular art form. The Museum has been particularly successful with school groups in developing programmes of work for children which use elements of the Museums exhibits for National Curriculum related work. The BFI has a current application to the Heritage Lottery Fund for funds to extend and improve the museum's facilities.

  Members of staff of the BFI have acted as advisers or assessors on a number of archival and museum applications.

2.  APPLYING TO THE HERITAGE LOTTERY FUND

  The BFI has been aware of an evolution of the structure of the application form for funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund. When we first applied in 1996 it was very unclear what was expected from an applicant for major project funding in the archival field. Much work was undertaken by us to develop plans for a much broader long term plan for our Collections than was eventually funded. In part, this lack of clarity was the result of the Fund being unable to work strategically within the different sectors due to the wording of the early Lottery distribution legislation.

  We believe the newly issued application documentation and guidance is much clearer and will enable a better assessment of priorities across competing claims for the limited finance available. The BFI looks forward to making future applications within this framework.

  The earlier position for the conservation application contrasted with that for our Museum application where there was a much clearer sense of the criteria against which the application would be examined. This was due in large part to the existence of standards set by the Museums and Galleries Commission, which the HLF had sensibly incorporated into its Guidelines.

  The establishment of standards for collection management is not the responsibility of any one overarching body in the UK. In the field of film archiving the BFI has the leading role in the UK and is a key organisation within the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) and its television equivalent, FIAT. The BFI has contributed to the setting of standards for film and television archiving within FIAF and FIAT.

  The MGC acts to establish and maintain standards for museums and gallaries within the UK but it is concerned with physical collections for a particular mode of display, which, though having a number of overlapping concerns, are different in kind from film and television preservation. The BFI is currently working with the MGC to develop agreed standards in relation to film. In addition we face the added complication that the collections in the BFI National Library fall within the area of responsibility of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts.

  The complication of these structures has also led to some problems in the appointment of assessors. The professionalism of the advisers and assessors for the BFI's successful archival application was faultless, but they were not experts in film or television. This is a complex situation for which there is no easy solution as the BFI is effectively the UK standards setting body for film and television archiving and clearly could not assess its own applications. We assume that this problem of assessment is similar in other areas and can best be addressed through the increasing case law and understanding of the Fund's professional advisers.

3.  FILM AND TELEVISION

  The BFI is pleased that the Heritage Lottery Fund has given due recognition to Britain's film and television heritage through its grants to date.

  We are aware of major grants to the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television and of smaller awards to the North West Film Archive and the Bill Douglas Centre at the University of Exeter. We also know that sympathetic advice has been given to the Scottish Film Archive and the Midlands Film Archive for their applications.

  We are not aware of how or whether the level of funding for film is set at a particular percentage or how the priorities for funding are set.

  We are worried that the latest Guidance on Libraries, however, suggests a bias against national libraries. We acknowledge the need for HLF to establish parameters and to operate more strategically than it has in the past but believe this strategy should be open to a wider scrutiny and debate amongst the heritage community before final Guidelines are issued.

4.  RECOMMENDATIONS

  One problem which we have faced in our applications to the HLF is the somewhat arbitrary age of an object—more than 20 years—before it can be considered for support. This has a very real impact on organisations like the BFI which are responsible for a comtemporary art form where because of technological advance paradoxically loss is more likely. We believe a more pragmatic approach would be sensible in such areas of contemporary collecting of cultural objects.

  Finally we believe the heritage world should work together in delivering access to digital surrogates within the national collections and that the Heritage Lottery Fund should, with Government, take a leading role in co-ordinating the process. Access and educational objectives for heritage collections are absolute imperatives in the information society, as has been recognised by the Government. It is important that organisations work together in securing partnerships with the private sector. The opportunities for leverage of HLF investment must be better articulated and achieved less opportunistically. We would expect the HLF to act in an increasingly strategic manner in developing wider access to the nation's heritage.

June 1998