[news.bbc.co.uk]

Content from the BBC’s Natural History Unit has been made available free of charge over the internet. The Open Earth Archive will include previously unseen clips from new wildlife series Planet Earth.

Footage can be viewed, downloaded and edited into personal projects as part of the Creative Archive Licence.

The scheme, which released the BBC’s news archives earlier this year, allows the material to be used for non-profit programme-making in the UK.

Inspire

Previous initiatives inspired by the Creative Archive have included a Superstar VJs competition which encouraged members of the public to remix clips from well-known BBC programmes to dance music.

Tomorrow’s World, The Money Programme and Walking With Beasts were among the shows which were used in the project.

The contest attracted 400 entries and was won by 20-year-old student Jack Spencer.

The aim of the ongoing project, which was first mooted by former BBC director general Greg Dyke in 2003, is to inspire people to use and creatively engage with clips.

Access to the BBC’s extensive news archive is seen as giving the British public a chance to share and keep “the punctuation marks in the stories of our lives”.

See also [www.bbc.co.uk] and [creativearchive.bbc.co.uk] – the latter explaining examples:

UK public getting creative

The Creative Archive Licence Group have been receiving lots of feedback which shows just how inventive the public really are […]

Responses to the Open Earth Archive have also started to pour in thick and fast. We were particularly pleased to hear from Nina Porter, a MSc student in Primate Conservation at Oxford Brookes University. For her final project Nina has been creating a DVD about Cusuco National Park in Honduras, which she has filmed herself. However, Nina couldn’t get any footage of Capuchin monkeys while she was in Honduras and so she was delighted to find some excellent clips of these monkeys in the Open Earth Archive. We wish her every success with her project!