"Over the past few years, we've seen a great deal of interest in our film library rising from the Asia-Pacific marketplace," said White. "We felt it was important to have someone representing our interests there locally, to provide customers greater access to our material and to increase awareness of our capabilities within Japan and its neighbouring countries."

In addition to nearly 40 years of footage from NGT&F, the Film Library also represents and/or manages the film libraries of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in the UK and the World Bank worldwide. Footage will be marketed for educational and commercial use in news and commercial productions, corporate marketing, broadcast and new media programming, digital presentations or consumer promotions.

National Geographic's ABU representative will be based in Kuala Lumpur, where he will liaise with National Geographic Film Library headquarters in Washington to obtain footage and fulfill orders.

In addition to relying on on-site representatives to interact with clients, the Film Library has recently upgraded its business-to-business website at www.ngtlibrary.com to create better functionality for its users. The new website now allows customers to search by streaming video and metadata-a process that increases the library's searchable archives from 1000,000 clips to nearly 2000,000.

Customers can continue to review streaming video selections online or request online or videocassette clips of metadata files. National Geographic has also launched the Idea Gallery, featuring some of National Geographic's most compelling footage. Clips are displayed by categories and subcategories that range from people and culture to oddities and curiosities, and are designed to inspire producers and encourage creative use of National Geographic footage. Finally, National Geographic has created a "My Projects" area, which allows users to save clips to project bins, enabling them to share their ideas with colleagues, save searches they can return to at a later date and initiate the rights clearance process.

National Geographic's Film Library functions as an archive and repository for all NGT&F-produced film and videotape material. The Library catalogues and sells stock footage from NGT&F's Specials, Explorer series, educational films, and other National Geographic Channel and NGT&F productions. Headquartered in Washington, DC, the Film Library supplies material to a satellite office in London and representatives across the globe. Its fully catalogued database, available online at www.ngtlibrary.com, allows clients to search footage based on subject, location or production criteria.