The Public Sector Research Exploitation fund (PSRE) has awarded the Imperial War Museum a grant of just under £1million to digitise its collections over the next three years.

The south London museum’s film and video archive, in particular, will benefit from the award. The collection includes documentary films such as the 1916 The Battle of the Somme (which is to be on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register), and Oscar-winning Second World War films Desert Victory and The True Glory. The project will develop cataloguing, research and viewing facilities and allow online webstream viewing; the film and video archive, one of the oldest in the world, has over 20,000 hours of footage from British and Commonwealth conflicts throughout the 20th century. Last year the Museum digitised thousands of its images, artworks, audio files and documents. The PRSE was established to aid public sector organisations to market their research.