Off-Air Recording, Tricontinental Cinema and University Libraries in the UK

This article examines the historical conjuncture in which off-air recording of television broadcasts became embedded within UK universities, diversifying film collections and expanding access to films from the global south. The article traces the emergence of off-air recording and its development as a long-term, decentralised practice enabled by changes to copyright legislation belatedly catching up with the affordances of the videocassette recorder (VCR). In a parallel development, innovation and experiment in the UK broadcast landscape, the establishment of Channel 4 and its pioneering film programming dedicated to global cinema, provided a regular supply of previously inaccessible films for recording. On this basis university libraries and film departments built substantial permanent film collections for teaching and research. Prompted by the persistence of hard to access titles as off-air recordings on the shelves of many university libraries, this article activates the history of off-air recording as a decentralised capacity to record, collect and curate, cultivated in-house by university libraries.