Conservation Specialist Team Leader
David joined the BFI in 1997 as a Despatch Assistant. During his career at the BFI he has been involved with the digitisation of content for a two-year JISC funded digitisation and access project, InView: British History through a Lens, resulting in 1,000 hours of digitised works streamed online for HE and FE. David also has experience with data cataloguing for the BFI’s Collections Information Database and has been part of teams working on several of the BFI’s major restorations including The Epic of Everest (1924).
In June 2013 David became joint team leader of the Acquisitions and Access team, which is now co-managed with Paul Hexter. Together they line manage sixteen Conservation Specialists, ensure timely delivery of film access requests and maintain a number of long term acquisition projects, all to the highest standards of film conservation.
The work of the Acquisitions and Access team is centred around the inspection and cataloguing of a film’s technical attributes and physical condition. The team prepares film for scanning, projection and printing and scans film to high definition for research access purposes. It also conducts in-depth exploratory work into a film’s provenance and its generational relationship with other film items through the process of Technical Selection.