Berlin

Berlin (/bərˈlɪn/, German: [bɛɐ̯ˈliːn]) is the capital of Germany and one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.5 million people, it is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union. Located in northeastern Germany on the banks of Rivers Spree and Havel, it is the centre of the Berlin-Brandenburg Metropolitan Region, which has about six million residents from over 180 nations. Due to its location in the European Plain, Berlin is influenced by a temperate seasonal climate. Around one-third of the city's area is composed of forests, parks, gardens, rivers and lakes.

First documented in the 13th century and situated at the crossing of two important historic trade routes, Berlin became the capital of the Margraviate of Brandenburg (1417–1701), the Kingdom of Prussia (1701–1918), the German Empire (1871–1918), the Weimar Republic (1919–1933) and the Third Reich (1933–1945).Berlin in the 1920s was the third largest municipality in the world. After World War II, the city was divided; East Berlin became the capital of East Germany while West Berlin became a de facto West German exclave, surrounded by the Berlin Wall (1961–1989) and East Germany territory. Following German reunification in 1990, Berlin was once again designated as the capital of united Germany.

Institut national de l'audiovisuel

The Institut national de l'audiovisuel (or INA, French for National Audiovisual Institute) is a repository of all French radio and television audiovisual archives. Additionally it provides free access to archives of countries such as Afghanistan and Cambodia. It has its headquarters in Bry-sur-Marne.

Since 2006, it has allowed free online consultation on a website called ina.fr with a search tool indexing 100,000 archives of historical programs, for a total of 20,000 hours.

Recordings

In the 1980s, it issued a large number of recordings on the label France's Concert Records. In the 1990s it launched its own label INA mémoire as the historical recording label of the Institut national de l'audiovisuel, and of the archives of Radio France.

History

The Institut national de l'audiovisuel was founded in 1975 by a law of 1974 with the purpose of conserving archives of audiovisual materials, research relating to them and professional training. In 1992, legal deposit was extended to television and radio, and the institute was to be the depository. This led to the establishment of the Inathèque in 1995, with the aim of conserving and making its holdings available to researchers and students. It was opened to the public in October 1998, at the Bibliothèque François-Mitterrand. In 2002, legal deposit was extended to cable and satellite television and in 2005 to terrestrial digital television. From September 2006, the institute has been responsible for archiving 17 radio and 45 television services amounting to 300,000 hours per year.

West Berlin

West Berlin was a city that existed between 1949 and 1990 as a political enclave surrounded by East Berlin and East Germany. It was located some 100 miles east of the East/West German border and was accessible by land from West Germany only by a narrow rail and highway corridor. It comprised the western regions of Berlin which consisted of the American, British, and French occupation sectors, which had been established in 1945. It was politically closely affiliated with, though not part of, West Germany. It had a special and unique legal status because its administration was formally conducted by the Western Allies. East Berlin consisted of the region occupied and administered by the Soviet Union, and was claimed as its capital by East Germany. The Western Allies did not recognise this claim, as they asserted that the entire city of Berlin was legally under four-power administration. The Berlin Wall, built in 1961, physically divided East and West Berlin until it fell in 1989.

Pathé News

Pathé News was a producer of newsreels, cinemagazines, and documentaries from 1910 until 1970 in the United Kingdom. Its founder, Charles Pathé, was a pioneer of moving pictures in the silent era. The Pathé News archive is known today as British Pathé. Its collection of news film and movies is fully digitised and available online.

History

Its roots lie in 1896 Paris, France, when Société Pathé Frères was founded by Charles Pathé and his brothers, who pioneered the development of the moving image. Charles Pathé adopted the national emblem of France, the cockerel, as the trademark for his company. After the company, now called Compagnie Générale des Éstablissements Pathé Frère Pt'honographes & Cinématographes, invented the cinema newsreel with Pathé-Journal. French Pathé began its newsreel in 1908 and opened a newsreel office in Wardour Street, London in 1910.

The newsreels were shown in the cinema and were silent until 1928. At first they ran for about four minutes, and were issued biweekly. Even though during the early days the camera shots were taken from a stationary position, the Pathé newsreels captured events such as Franz Reichelt's fatal parachute jump from the Eiffel Tower, and suffragette Emily Davison's fatal injury by a racehorse at the 1913 Epsom Derby.

Archive

An archive is an accumulation of historical records or the physical place they are located. Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or organization's lifetime, and are kept to show the function of that person or organization. Professional archivists and historians generally understand archives to be records that have been naturally and necessarily generated as a product of regular legal, commercial, administrative or social activities. They have been metaphorically defined as "the secretions of an organism", and are distinguished from documents that have been consciously written or created to communicate a particular message to posterity.

In general, archives consist of records that have been selected for permanent or long-term preservation on grounds of their enduring cultural, historical, or evidentiary value. Archival records are normally unpublished and almost always unique, unlike books or magazines for which many identical copies exist. This means that archives are quite distinct from libraries with regard to their functions and organization, although archival collections can often be found within library buildings.