Heritage Open Days 2024: Go inside the archive at the BFI Conservation Centre

On Sunday 8 September and Sunday 15 September the BFI Conservation Centre will open its doors as part of the Heritage Open Days festival. This is a rare opportunity for the public to experience part of the BFI National Archive and see first-hand the specialist skills, technology and vaults which support the conservation of our national collection.

This year’s event will include displays and demonstrations from across our activities including film inspection, Special Collections, video and television preservation, BFI Reuben Library, BFI Replay, small gauge projection, mini tours of our film vault and a demonstration of the history of film on film in our theatre. Curators and archivists from the BFI’s current strategic National Lottery funded project, Our Screen Heritage, will also be on site with demos and workshops.

Booking is now open for both days. See Heritage Open Days to reserve your tickets.

Here are some of the BFI National Archive and Library team members you will meet on the day.

HaoYun, our Collections Audit Assistant, joined the BFI in 2024 for the Audit to Access project. She works with the Special Collections team to undertake a box-level audit of the BFI National Archive’s paper collections, including conducting a basic inventory, researching the provenance information, maintaining location data and assessing its potential conservation needs, particularly for those un-accessioned paper collections. The goal is to help deepen the understanding of the collections and enable greater access to the public.

 HaoYun has an MA in Museum Studies (University of Leicester) and has worked and interned in museums such as the Museum of the Order of St John, Chung Tai World Museum (Taiwan) and Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Art (Taiwan). She is interested in collections care and management as well as enhancing public accessibility of collections.

Carolyne joined the BFI 25 years ago from local government archives in Greater Manchester. As a Special Collections archivist, she works with the BFI’s wonderful collection of filmmaker’s papers. Donated by some of the key figures in British film and television, they include scripts, correspondence, publicity ephemera, photographs and storyboards. Astonished at how quickly her time has passed at the BFI, Carolyne puts that down to every day being different, always full of surprises and fascinating things to learn.

Outside of work, Carolyne is passionate about community theatre and is a long-time member of Kings Langley Players. Preferring directing plays to acting in them, she also manages their enormous store of costume and props.

Favourite films – anything with George Formby or Helena Bonham Carter.

Ella first started at the BFI in 2017 as a Box Office Assistant for the London Film Festival. After several years in the Front of House team, she moved to a new role as the Coordinator for Heritage Programmes in 2020. In her role, Ella supports the coordination and management of the archive’s major preservation and access projects. Ella is one of the organisers of Heritage Open Day.

Ella is a big fan of classical Hollywood cinema and counts The Women (1939), The Sound of Music (1965) and Jurassic Park (1993) among her favourite films. Away from work, she enjoys crochet/knitting, swimming and travelling.

Tony’s background is in photography, dark room and printing, he achieved a three-year City & Guilds qualification which led to a career at the BFI. He loves cinema and seeing a film on the big screen still excites him, especially cult, sci-fi, horror and rare films. He is a total geek with a love of music, books, comics and graphic novels. He has been adopted by a wonderful tuxedo cat called Whiskers who takes up most of his time.

Alys has been working as a Video Conservation Specialist at the BFI since 2015, specialising in preserving the archive’s television content including the extensive range of programmes from ITV, Channel Four and Channel 5. This involves her ability to operate many of the archive’s videotape machines (of which there are around 40 different formats) so that the content can be captured and saved digitally for future generations.

Previously, Alys spent around 25 years in the television post-production industry, operating some of those same formats when they were the current technology and copying, editing and versioning the resulting recordings for commercial clients.

However, Alys started her working life at the BBC (drawn there largely by her love for Doctor Who, although she sadly never worked on the programme). Moving initially from catering via a radio admin section to the BBC Enterprises video department, she has spent most of her life following the dream of a TV addict: being paid to watch and preserve television.

As BFI Replay Engagement Officer, Sinéad supports the platform across UK public libraries and leads on outreach and engagement. Before landing at the BFI, she spent many years working in academic libraries, across a variety of roles including library collections, customer engagement, planning and user experience. Never without a pen, and often scribbling down story ideas, she also works with indie filmmakers and film festivals, spreading film love far and wide. When not lurking inside a library, cinema or bookshop, you’ll most likely find her obsessively organising something, watching Murder She Wrote, or guffawing at stand-up comedy (or even better, musical comedy).

Mihaela began her film career as a digital projectionist at a cinema in Ealing before moving on to mastering trailers and feature films for a post-production company in Soho. With that expertise, she joined the BFI in the summer of 2024 and is currently employed as a Digital Media Specialist. Her interests span from a cosy evening movie to rock climbing on the weekends. Although her job involves watching movies almost 70% of the time, she is still a keen cinemagoer in her free time. Film festivals are a big passion for Mihaela, and she aims to be involved as a spectator as well as a film selector at various festivals around the UK. She is also an avid swimmer, solo hiker and amateur documentary photographer. Documentaries are a great source of inspiration for both her personal projects and everyday life, Salome Jashi’s Taming the Garden currently being her favourite documentary film.

With over a decade’s experience in photofinishing at one of the world’s largest photographic laboratories, Martin joined the BFI in 1988 as part of Project 2000 at the then newly built Conservation Centre. He now takes care of all formats of projection, from traditional 35mm film to digital, including nitrate film.

Martin assesses the quality of prints for projection in retrospectives at BFI Southbank, for festivals, international screenings and research bookings. This comprises around 400 features a year, including newsreels and shorts, from 1895 to the current day.

Lucy has worked for the BFI within the Data and Digital Preservation department for over 10 years, previously working for the BBC Archives. She has worked on the BFI’s last two large scale digitisation, preservation and access projects – Unlocking Film Heritage and the Heritage 2022 programme and is now involved in various strands in the Our Screen Heritage project.

She manages a team of Digital Media and Digital Preservation Infrastructure Specialists, and a Digital Preservation Archivist. They ensure that digital media is safely preserved and accessible, practicing and sharing good digital preservation principles and processes.

Jo previously worked for Northants Police within their Digital Intelligence Unit and supported detectives who required telecommunications and surveillance authorities. She was also part of a 24-hour on call team who would help to locate vulnerable missing people through mobile phone tracing.

Jo joined the BFI in 2019, having realised her obsession with film was too big to ignore and knew it was time for a career change. Her current role involves supporting the Director of Collections Operations and Head of Conservation as well as other teams based at the Conservation Centre.

She is a keen cineaste with a love of British folk horror, Iranian cinema, 1970s Hollywood, film noir and anything involving Nicolas Cage. Her other interests include following space exploration missions, taking long walks in the countryside, watching live wrestling, reading, and writing a film blog that she has finally plucked up the courage to publish.

Adrienne helps the Collection Projects Librarian to preserve and promote the library’s huge and varied collection, the largest and oldest of its kind. She joined the BFI Reuben Library in 2012 after working in academic, college and school libraries. Highlights of her job are cataloguing and classification, visiting donors, crafting displays and helping readers – especially with tricky enquiries.

Outside of work, she volunteers in a primary school as a reading mentor and librarian. She enjoys slow cinema, silent film and musicals. She reads, keeps chickens, goes to the theatre and learning Welsh. Croeso i Sefydliad Ffilmiau Prydain!

Karen came to her job through an unusual route, having worked as a technician in both NHS and Cancer Research labs. Following a career break, a course in computing and with an interest in non-fiction film (especially science and nature) she joined the BFI as a Film Technician at the Conservation Centre in 2002.

She loves the practical nature of her job, the film handling and working as part of a team. There is always something interesting and new to learn.

When not at work she enjoys long walks with her family and friends in the beautiful Chilterns. She volunteers as a family mentor for Home Start Herts, is a member of Berkhamsted Litter Pickers, and contributes to various environmental groups.

Wendy joined the BFI as Project Archivist in 2012, working on the Ken Loach Collection, then became Special Collections Archivist. Along with the Special Collections team, she is responsible for looking after the BFI’s extensive paper collections. Her work includes acquisition and donor relations, cataloguing, preservation, outreach, and developing archival practice. She is also co-lead of the new AHRC funded project Women’s Screen Work in the Archives Made Visible, and co-edited the volume The Materiality of the Archive: Creative Practice in Context with Sue Breakell (Routledge, 2023).

Kitty joined the BFI in 2023 after four years freelancing as an archive researcher and producer for various film and TV productions, covering everything from the New York mafia to 1980s pop icons. She fell in love with the BFI as a student in London and spent an awful lot of time in the library at BFI Southbank, reading about 1970s Hollywood, The Third Man (1949), 1930s French film and paranoia thrillers. After a stint as a one-woman cinema team at a venue under a railway arch in east London, she completed an MA in moving image preservation and set her sights on the film archive.

She’s now an assistant curator on the BFI’s Our Screen Heritage project, hoping to seek out and engage with new audiences and creators and bring them into the world of the BFI National Archive. She’s been researching online moving image, and drawing connections back to the BFI’s existing collections, and is keen to hear what *you* like to watch.

Her favourite film could change every week, and right now it’s Stop Making Sense (1984) by Jonathan Demme (and the Talking Heads). But it could also be Chungking Express (1994), I Know Where I’m Going! (1945), Auntie Mame (1958), Jacquot de Nantes (1991), Life Is Sweet (1990), Sherlock Jr. (1924), Jaws (1975)… or one she hasn’t seen yet.

Tabitha is the BFI National Archive’s first Paper Conservator. She works with the Special Collections Team to establish care systems for and open access to its vast collection of paper holdings which contain tools of the industry such as film posters, scripts, designs and sketch books.

Tabitha has a background in studio art and darkroom photography and earned an MA in Paper Conservation from Camberwell College of the Arts. She has worked with institutions such as the Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center, The Wellcome Collection, The New Orleans Notarial Archives and in private practice before coming to the BFI. She is most interested in modern and contemporary materials on paper and all things related to memory work.  

Becky is an assistant curator at the BFI National Archive, selecting and acquiring examples of online moving image from the birth of the internet until now, part of a National Lottery-funded project, alongside her colleague Kristina Tarasova. 

Becky joined the BFI in 2002 and has had various roles, including being the project assistant for the Mitchell and Kenyon collection of silent films, coordinating preservation, research and public engagement. As a non-fiction curator she contributed to the BFI’s post-war documentary project and more recently, coordinated the preservation of titles funded through the BFI Filmmaking Fund as a curatorial archivist.        

Becky has written pieces for Medium, Sight and Sound and the BFI website. She has contributed writing to the publications: The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon (2004) and Shadows of Progress: Documentary Film in Post-War Britain (2010), and BFI video publishing releases, including Play for Today: Volume 2. With colleagues from across the arts sector, Becky represented the BFI in the Southbank Centre’s Accelerate Leadership Programme in 2018. She is an AHRC-funded graduate of the University of East Anglia’s Film Archiving MA, where she had placements at the Yorkshire Film Archive and the Library of Congress.

Kay is a Collections Audit Assistant in the Special Collections team. She joined in 2024 as part of the Audit to Access Project to carry out a box-level audit of the BFI National Archive’s paper collection, which aims to provide greater access of collections to the public and deepen our understanding of these collections. As part of this role, she provides a brief overview of the material, researches the provenance, captures the collection’s location and assesses potential conservation needs.

Kay has an MA in History (University of Reading).  She previously worked as a Collections Technician at the River and Rowing Museum and has volunteered in multiple local museums and archives. Kay’s interests are in collections care, women’s history, and the history of post boxes.

Rosie is a curator of fiction film at the BFI National Archive, and formally a moving image archivist. Her role focuses on contemporary British cinema. She is responsible for selecting and acquiring incoming moving image collections and researching and interpreting existing collections. Her other specialist interests include the history of British cinema, small gauge film, silent westerns, film projection and film collectors. She is currently a part-time PhD student at the University of Bristol, researching the history and culture of 9.5mm private film collecting in Britain.

Rosie has a BA (hons) in Costume for the Stage and Screen and an MA in European Cinema Studies. She is a graduate of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation in Rochester, NY, USA, and joined the BFI as an audiovisual archivist in 2018. Rosie previously worked as assistant curator and a board director at Afrika Eye Film Festival, and assistant curator at the Slapstick Festival. She is a co-founder and steering group member of Watershed’s Cinema Rediscovered, and the Bristol-based silent film organisation Southwest Silents.

After spending five years working as a full-time projectionist at her local cinema, Louise joined the BFI in 2005 as a Film Technician. Now as part of the Image Quality Specialist team, she works primarily on digital and photochemical restoration and remastering activities and has been part of several recent high profile projects including the digitisation of the Royal Collection, producing work featured on the BBC in honour of Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee and the Coronation of HM King Charles III. She was also a key part of the H22 project strand responsible for producing over 100 brand new film prints which have entertained audiences all over the world. On top of her regular work, Louise has also co-written several long form articles for the BFI website, celebrating all things nitrate film and the 100th anniversary of 16mm.

Outside of the BFI, Louise is a keen gardener and enjoys working on her allotment(s) as well as collecting film and TV soundtracks on vinyl. She also lives with the thrill of being an Arsenal Women (and England Lionesses) supporter while co-habiting with her long-suffering partner who was raised Spurs.

Nina is a Library Assistant at the BFI Reuben Library and started her career in libraries at the Public Health Laboratory in Colindale before moving in 2000 to the BFI, in the role of Library Secretary, becoming a member of the Reader Services team as a Library Assistant in 2011.  

She enjoys helping library patrons with research enquiries and usage of the microfilm/fiche equipment.  

Behind the scenes, she is a member of the team dealing with our very busy advance request service as well as usual library duties relating to stock management, processing new journals, adding skeleton book records, and requesting festival catalogues from all over the world.

She loves watching films, concerts, theatre, a good drama, world cinema, animation, musical or comedy. Jazz and dance too – so a broad spectrum. Anything but horror, experimental and heavy rock music – not her style, darlings!!

Saul has been professionally involved in the world of film, television and broadcast for over 15 years, which has included stints as a sound recordist/boom operator, dialogue editor (mostly for computer games) and a period as a technical operator at the BBC Archives in Perivale. 

He loves working as a Video Conservation Specialist at the BFI National Archive for the sheer variety and quality of content it contains, as well as the friendly and knowledgeable colleagues he gets to work alongside. He is proud to have played a crucial part in the preservation of some of his favourite TV programmes and films from the BFI National Television Archives collection. Mainly occupied with 1” C-format Ampex VTRs, he can also be found digitising magnetic and optical audio formats. In his spare time, he likes pretending he can play guitar like Sonny Sharrock, Frank Zappa or “Fast” Eddie Clarke.

Giles is an Access Officer; he is a member of a team that co-ordinates Access to the moving image collections for internal BFI clients eg, Research Viewings, Archive Sales, Curatorial, Archive Bookings and Southbank TV programming, as well as answering public enquiries in relation to the collections. The team also retrieves from the multimedia vault at the Conservation Centre, library materials held for the BFI Reuben Library based at Southbank. His BFI career started as a Film Technician back in early 1997. He co-ordinated the HLF Video Quad Transfer project from 1999 to 2003, which involved the team transferring over 32 thousand donated ITV TV programmes ranging from the 1960s through to the mid 1980s, from obsolete analogue 2” videotape, preserving to digital Digibeta videotape (the then popular industry standard video format of the day).

He has always had a fascination with television (the humour in the adverts makes him smile). Part of his college course back in his day involved learning the processes for live television, which links to his main hobby, in which he helped set up, maintains and currently leads a small team which live stream the services for his local church.

He has always had an interest in history, which he believes has led him to where he is today. He enjoys helping clients access the collections and the stories that they tell.