JISC Digitisation Programme

Archiving for the Future: using archives to enhance learning and teaching in drama and theatre studies

Event Description:

This event is being organised in conjunction with the Institute for Performing Arts Development at the University of East London and the CEDAR (Clustering and Enhancing Digital Archives for Research) project: a unique approach to clustering and enhancing digital theatre archives through a collaboration between UEL, Royal Holloway, Sheffield and Nottingham universities as well as Kings College, London.

The day will consist of a series of presentations of good practice in using digital archives with undergraduate and postgraduate students.

It will include an opportunity for delegates to experiment and reflect on the use of archives for their own practice.

The target audience for the event is: drama/theatre studies lecturers, researchers, theatre historians, digital and web-practitioners, archivists, library and learning support service staff.

Topics covered will include:

• The use of the East London Theatre Archive for undergraduate theatre students;
• The connection between archives and web-based platforms for learning;
• Making archives ‘living’ through the user-interface.

The event aims to provide an opportunity for the sharing of teaching pedagogies and an open forum for the discussion of methodological and other concerns.

More details are available from the event Programme

Two new online collections, funded by the JISC Digitisation programme, launched yesterday giving global access to thousand of images ranging from polar expeditions to theatre and entertainment in the East End of London.

Freeze Frame: Historic Polar Images features an archive of 20,000 images depicting the history of polar exploration, inlcuding the adventures of famous explorers such as Captain Scott, Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton and, more recently, Sir Ranulph Fiennes.

The project was carried out by the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, in collaboration with DSpace@Cambridge.

The Scott Polar Research Institute in the University of Cambridge holds a world-class collection of photographic negatives illustrating polar exploration from the nineteenth century onwards. Freeze Frame is the result of a two-year digitisation project that brings together photographs from both Arctic and Antarctic expeditions. Here you can discover the polar regions through the eyes of those explorers and scientists who dared to go into the last great wildernesses on earth.

The project has had extensive media coverage, all of which can be found on the JISC’s Communications page and a slide show on the BBC website.

The East London Theatre Archive (ELTA) website brings together selections of material from a variety of theatre collections, including the V&A Theatre Collections, Hackney empire, Half Moon Young People’s Theatre, Hoxton Hall, Theatre Royal Stratford East, Theatre Venture and Wilton’s Music Hall.

The collections can be searched or browsed and a number of thematic essays contextualise the material, exploring issues such as East London immigration, black characters in theatre, crime and punshment and nautical drama, among others.

ELTA represents an innovative step towards unlocking the theatrical past of East London for academics and historians on a national and international basis. While the theatre of the West End has been subject to a notable amount of research, less attention to date has been paid to the East End, despite its significant contribution to performing arts in the 19th to 21st centuries. This resource will help to address this and enrich researchers’ knowledge of East London’s pivotal role in theatre.

The East London Theatre Archive is creating an invaluable database of performing arts resources, from playbills and programmes to press cuttings and photographs. It will consist of around 15,000 digital objects, taken from East London theatres.

As an extra part of their work, they have commissioned photography of some of the theatres themselves, such as Wilton Hall, the Theatre Royal or the wonderfully named Half Moon theatre.

The team have decided to put these photos up on Flickr as an extra dissemination channel. A dedicated website is currently being built, but the team wanted to test what usage was like using a publicly available platform. Usage is currently being monitored, and the team will report back as their project progresses.