The Invisible Women - Developing a Feminist Approach to Film Archive Metadata and Cataloguing

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Our project, "The Invisible Women - Developing a Feminist Approach to Film Archive Metadata and Cataloguing" intends to explore how film archives can take practical action to update, enhance and improve catalogue metadata via feminist research methodologies. By using this approach, we will reveal the hidden heritage related to women's creativity.Digital metadata and catalogue records are a crucial element of how different archives represent the collections and materials they hold. Recent research has shown how existing assumptions can lead to key absences within data sets, with different groups being overlooked and hidden, including women. Within film archives records and cataloguing guidelines, for instance, international metadata schemas make women's contributions invisible by not identifying the gender of individuals. The absence of a feminist-informed approach to digital curation within existing film archive metadata systems has meant that women's creative labour is not fully acknowledged within catalogue records, which can lead to their creativity being invisible within national and regional film collections.This project expands out from a pilot study of catalogue records from six UK regional archives conducted in 2019 which revealed the current paucity of detailed catalogue metadata relating to women filmmakers. Working with film archives, many of which are aware of the practical difficulties in converting a commitment to women filmmakers into practical actions and the limitations of recognised archival standards, wee will focus on two key aspects: a) Offering practical interventions to qualify and expand existing and new metadata within film archives (and other archival practices)b) Exploring the cataloguing of women amateur filmmakers across two national collections: the Institute of Amateur Cinematographers at the East Anglian Film Archive (EAFA) and the collections of the IFI Irish Film Archive (IIFA).Women's filmmaking labour has been historically underrepresented and unacknowledged, in the world of film archives as much as in other aspects of creative work and cultural heritage. We will focus here on women within amateur filmmaking - an alternative arena of creative production that has given voice to women's creativity, interests, and concerns for almost a century. Yet amateur films have been a low priority for cataloguing or digitisation, which means there is limited metadata relating to the women filmmakers involved: records that tend to reduce or overlook women's creative labour, particularly in multiple-authored work.By combining a focus on hidden women's creativity, the world of the women amateur filmmakers in the UK and Ireland, and the practical steps that archives can take to deepen and enrich existing and new catalogue metadata, we intend to make visible what is currently invisible. This will include creating newly digitised films by these innovative women, offering fuller catalogue records, and the practical application of our research with our partners EAFA and IIFA.