The London Community Video Archive (LCVA) was established to help rescue, nurture and disseminate a unique and threatened part of the capital's video culture, through archiving, oral history, outreach work and a web site
The focus with the LCVA is broadly on the London boroughs and the community video work made there, alongside associated contemporaneous documents (leaflets, photographs, catalogues, manuals, correspondence) from the period, 1970-1985.
I was acting as archival consultant on the project collating and coordinating video artefacts (U-matic, 1 and 1/2" video tape) ready for digitisation. One of the major challenges was bringing the digital assets into something tangible online. Working with data management specialists I project managed a bespoke content management system to help make sense of the ever-growing digital catalogue, and deliver the front end website.
I'm very proud of what this project stands for, and the videos which Tony Dowmunt and Andy Porter, and Ed Webb-Ingall have curated and collected are a fascinating, necessary insight into this period and place.
The LCVA represents Tony and Andy's career-long commitment to this cause and without them behind the project, this important and vulnerable work would have been lost to the passage of time and decay.
We are hoping to secure further funding in 2024 (and beyond) to digitise more material and rebuild the website for a new generation.
For further reading on this area, check out film-maker and LCVA Outreach and Engagement person Ed Webb-Ingall's chapter in a published book on independent cinema in the UK, edited by two respected scholar practitioners. Here - Mulvey, L. & Clayton, S. eds., Other Cinemas… Politics, Culture and Experimental Film in the 1970s (IB Tauris, 2017).