Usually, no-one writing an editorial wants people to stop reading it before they’ve finished the first paragraph. But I’m going to break from the norm and actively encourage you to click on the ‘View background’ icon at the top right of this website. By doing so, you’ll have the chance to watch a short showreel of some of the most iconic footage from ITN Source’s archive – just make sure you come back to this article afterwards!

…Hopefully you enjoyed that journey through the news of yesteryear as much as I did when I first saw our compilation. Those images capture some of the most defining moments in the last few decades – from wars to landmark Royal events. Footage on the video wall, such as ITN’s Michael Nicholson clambering over the walls of the US Embassy in Saigon, is irreplaceable and I firmly believe that archive businesses such as ours have a duty to ensure such footage is preserved for future generations as well as to make it easily accessible to today’s film-makers and producers. In effect, we are the guardians of material of significant historic importance that lives in our archive and we must take steps to ensure its safe-keeping.

Indeed, preservation is one of the reasons why ITN Source has undertaken a mammoth two-year project to overhaul ITN’s archive, digitising and flash scanning over 30,000 cans of film and legacy tape formats. The final few films and tapes are being digitised this month and the content is available to search, preview, purchase and download from our website.  Digitising our content not only makes it easier to preserve footage for the future, but it also opens up new opportunities for wider use such as embedding video in e-books to illustrate moments in history.

What will be of interest to news and current affairs producers at News Xchange is that digitised archive material also means that you can more easily search and download footage. This reduces the turnaround time of licensing archive picture for whatever package or programme you’re working on and means that content delivery is a lot quicker too. In the case of ITN’s archive, if you want a clip from the BAFTA-winning ITV News or the distinctive journalism that Channel 4 News has been renowned for almost 30 years – you’ll be able to find it in seconds rather than hours.

So, if the video wall of ITN highlights has given you a taster of what footage lives in our archives, visit our website at www.itnsource.com where you’ll be able to find a lot more historic footage that we’re taking great care of for your use and for posterity.