Empowering Archivists: Applying New Tools and Approaches for Better Representation of Women in Audio-Visual Collections

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Our original 2-year 'Women in Focus' project started from the understanding that 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. Women have rarely been a priority for cataloguing or digitisation, with limited metadata relating to the filmmakers involved and records that reduce or overlook women's creative labour, particularly in multiple-authored work. Through focusing on collections of amateur filmmaking at two partner archives (the East Anglian Film Archive and the Irish Film Institute Archive), we have provided concrete evidence of the underlying issues and processes that prevent more women filmmakers being visible within film archive cataloguing practices. Having confirmed the scale of this problem our project then developed a set of practical archive-specific tools that can be used to tackle recurring issues when creating metadata for new catalogue records and amending / improving existing metadata.'Engaging Archivists: Applying New Tools and Approaches for Better Representation of Women in Audio-Visual Collections' aims to implement that toolkit through closer interaction and knowledge exchange with an expanded range of archive organisations in the UK and Ireland. We will deploy this toolkit through a) bespoke training sessions on archival practice delivered at film & media archive settings in the UK and Ireland; and b) broader archive sector training for non-specialist archivists who are less familiar with audio-visual collections (a gap in archival practice that our project has identified). Using this training will allow us to gather evidence about the advantages the archive sector can gain through the broader application and use of our tools. This will allow us to advocate for shifts in archive practice at a more international level.