The century of film: bibliographic control and legal deposit of the moving image

1895 saw the dawn of film – a new publication medium that we associate particularly with the century that has just ended. The survival of films and of information about them has been severely hampered in the UK by the absence of legal deposit. At the beginning of the new century, proposals to remedy that situation would not only benefit film but might, for the new digital media, help to prevent the loss of treasures on the scale of that suffered by film in the twentieth century.