New culture secretary Jeremy Hunt has announced £73 million in cuts from the Department for Culture, Media & Sport’s budget.
They include saving £2.5 million by axing the Delivering Digital Access component of Screen Heritage UK, a £25 million scheme established by the British Film Institute for the UK Film Council in 2007 to widen public access to old films.
Delivering Digital Access was one of three strands to the project, which involved a team led by the BFI’s strategic development head Richard Patterson.
It would have allowed users to search across multiple film databases, digitising old analogue films, building access platforms and researching what users want from such a programme.
The programme budget had been £4 million, according to a 2009 document. DCMS today says: “Spend to date on delivering digital access is approximately £1.3 million.”
At one point, the BFI and BBC had been talking about using some iPlayer-like technology to open up archive access as part of the BBC Archive project, but we don’t know whether this has come to much.
Screen Heritage UK’s two other strands, revitialising national and regional film archives, will go ahead, at a combined £19.9 million cost.