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STOP PRESS! ARKive gets £1.6m green light to start work Fantastic news! ARKive - set to become the most comprehensive digital library of images and recordings of the world's species - has just been given the go-ahead for a Heritage Lottery Fund grant of £1.6 million. This will enable The Wildscreen Trust to develop the British 'chapter' of ARKive - the first strand of a long-term project to create the world's centralised digital library of all species that have ever been filmed or photographed. The HLF grant gives The Wildscreen Trust the green light to recruit a production team to start researching, selecting and compiling films, photographs and sound recordings for up to 2,000 British plants and animals. We know from work already done that valuable scientific and historical images and recordings are scattered throughout a huge variety of collections owned by private individuals, commercial libraries, conservation organisations and research institutions. We will be asking all our supporters and collaborators to help us track down these materials, so that ARKive can maintain them for future generations, and make them publicly accessible via the web. Even before confirmation of the HLF award, Hewlett Packard Labs had already pledged £1.5m earlier this year to help develop ARKive's technical infrastructure - researching and developing ways of capturing, storing, tagging, tracking and retrieving these materials, and protecting copyright. At the Wildscreen Festival in Bristol (7 - 13 October), wildlife film-makers from all around the globe viewed the new ARKive demo which will soon be publicly accessible on the ARKive prototype web site [www.wildscreen.org.uk/arkive]. They were particularly enthusiastic about the way in which materials are being 'layered', to make them accessible to different user groups - from the youngest schoolchild to the academic scientist. With the summer opening of Wildscreen at-Bristol, the new visitor attraction about evolution and biodiversity, ARKive now has a permanent home and headquarters. For Christopher Parsons OBE, ARKive's creator and Wildscreen founder, the money from the HLF and the technical support from HP Labs mean that, what started as a dream in the 1980s, at the time years ahead of the available technology and resources, can at last become a reality. For more information or if you can help us with the creation of the British Chapter contact: Harriet Nimmo, ARKive Development Manager, PO Box 366, Deanery
Road, Bristol, BS99 2HD, UK. |