Since the pioneering days of cinematography, film has been used by scientists to document, analyse and teach about complex phenomena, from the social behaviour of tribes to the growth of tumour cells.

But many national and private audiovisual service institutions — including those in the Netherlands, Austria, Hungary and Japan — have been closed over the past decade owing to the high cost of storing, preserving and distributing celluloid film.

Two years ago, Germany's only institute for scientific film, the Institut für den Wissenschaftlichen Film (IWF) in Göttingen, faced a similar fate. Its days seemed numbered after Germany's science council, the Wissenschaftsrat, criticized its failure to invest in new electronic media, and recommended that federal funding be withdrawn (see Nature 391, 425; 1998).

But a strategy based on embracing the opportunities offered by the Internet — and a 50% cut in its annual budget, provided jointly by federal and regional governments, to DM7 million (US$3.2 million) — has helped the IWF to survive. The institute has now begun to create an online video library that is available to scientists, science teachers, film editors and producers worldwide.

The federal research ministry last month approved an additional DM5 million grant for the digitalization of the IWF's collection of around 7,000 films and video tapes, 5,000 of which were made at the IWF. Most of these recordings are visual aids for research and education in many areas of science, medicine, anthropology and psychology.

Digitalization will start with the IWF's 400 most frequently requested films, including recordings of the activities in potassium ion channels and of material transport by North Sea currents.

These films, to be cut into about 1,000 two-minute sequences, will be online next spring, says Hartmut Rudolph, the institute's scientific director. By 2005, around 30,000 minutes of film should be available on the Internet, he says. The content of all available recordings will be scientifically annotated, and orders for clips will be taken online.

The IWF will no longer receive a fixed budget for producing new films, but must generate its own revenue. Rudolph hopes that the Internet library will help increase sales to commercial users. “We will of course continue to be a service institute for scientists,” says Rudolph. “But financially we have become increasingly dependent on licensing our films to commercial users.”

The institute is already licensing recordings to TV stations in Germany and to the BBC in Britain.

http://www.iwf.de