Northern Region Film and Television Archive - Current Operations

Current Operations

The NRFTA is based at Teesside University in Middlesbrough, where most of the collection is stored. Limited storage facilities are also operated at Tyne and Wear Archives Service in Newcastle upon Tyne as well, but all work on the collection now takes place at Teesside. Viewing facilities for members of the public are available at Newcastle, but preservation and cataloguing work no longer takes place there. As with any archive, the NRFTA undertakes three core activities.

• Acquisition. There is no system of legal deposit for audiovisual media in the UK, and so moving image archives have to identify appropriate materials for preservation and persuade their owners to deposit them.
• Preservation. Film, magnetic tape and digital optical media are among the most technically complex of any archival medium to preserve for the long-term. NRFTA staff carry out this task through a combination of preserving original media and copying where this is necessary to prevent the loss of content.
• Access. This includes dealing with viewing requests from individual researchers, organising public screenings and licensing material to film and TV programme makers, and for online use. Access work can also involve negotiating copyright clearance and overcoming technical issues needed to provide high-quality access copies.

The NRFTA is funded from a combination of sources, including public money, revenue from commercial footage licensing to broadcasters (all other paid-for services are charged on a cost-covering basis) and 'in kind' contributions from its constituent organisations, principally Teesside University and Tyne and Wear Archives Service. The NRFTA's work is overseen by a board of directors, and its permanent staff are all employees of Teesside University.