Heritage Open Days 2025: Go inside the archive at the BFI Conservation Centre

On Sunday 21 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, collections development, digital preservation, mini tours of our film vault and a demonstration of the history of film on film in our theatre. There will be talks from our curatorial and library teams as well as an opportunity to learn more (and have a play!) with BFI Replay — a free-to-access digital archive exclusively available in UK public libraries.

Booking is required and for more information see the Heritage Open Days directory.

Here are some of the BFI National Archive 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 in the Screencraft team to undertake a top-level audit of the BFI National Archive’s paper collections. This consists of conducting a basic inventory, researching the provenance information, maintaining location data and assessing its potential conservation needs. The aim of the project 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 the history of democracy progress in Taiwan, true crime and Shaun the Sheep.

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 & graphic novels. He has been adopted by a wonderful tuxedo cat called ‘Whisk-ers’ 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 (1963- ), 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 (1984-96), or guffawing at stand-up comedy (or even better, musical comedy).

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 has been in her current role since February 2025 and a typical day could involve supporting commercial or academic partnerships, assisting external researchers or collaborations with the wider moving image archive community. It involves keeping up to date with changes to the copyright landscape and the potential of AI and machine learning in allowing greater access to collections, while considering the ethical implications.

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 discovering new cinemas, 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 collections. 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 a dysgu Cymraeg. Croeso i Sefydliad Ffilmiau Prydain!

Wendy joined the BFI as Project Archivist in 2012, working on the Ken Loach Collection, then became Screencraft Archivist. Along with the Screencraft 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 the 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!

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 & 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 the Assistant Curator of Screencraft supporting outreach, collection care and the development of the BFI National Archive’s photograph and design holdings. Most recently, Kay has worked with Dacorum Heritage on the From Taste Wars to Star Wars: Advertising Food and Film Made in Hertfordshire pop-up exhibition also open on Sunday 21st September at the Civic Centre in Berkhamsted High Street.

She joined in 2024 as a Collections Audit Assistant on the Audit to Access project where she worked on a top-level audit of the uncatalogued and partially catalogued collections of the BFI National Archive’s paper collection. Kay has an MA in History (University of Reading). She has previously worked as a Collections Technician at the River and Rowing Museum and volunteered in multiple local museums and archives. Kay’s interests are social history, women’s history, and the history of post boxes!

After graduating from university and spending five years working in projection, Louise originally joined the BFI in 2005 as a Film Technician. Having worked in numerous conservation departments over the years, she is now a Senior Conservator in Image Quality, working primarily on digital and photochemical restoration and remastering activities. She worked extensively on 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 and also played a key part in the H22 project strand responsible for producing over 100 brand new film prints for the national collection. On top of her usual daily activities which currently involve restoring the Stoll Sherlock Holmes films, Louise has also co-written several long form articles for the BFI website; celebrating all things nitrate film and the 100th anniversary of 16mm. She has also featured in a BFI YouTube video introducing the public to one of the weird and wonderful items of the archive collection, a reel of film recovered from the wreck of the Lusitania.

Outside of the BFI, Louise can usually be found either threatening her allotment(s) with a spade, collecting film and TV soundtracks on vinyl or supporting women’s sport. She’s an Arsenal Women season ticket holder and recently returned from a trip to Switzerland following the England Lionesses on their triumphant European title defence.

Saul has been professionally involved in the world of film, television & 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 & 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 e.g., 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 1960’s through to the mid 1980’s, 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 make him smile). Part of his college course back in his day, involved learning the processes for Live Television. This links him to his main hobby, where 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 from whatever decade that they come from.

In early 2025, Ana joined the BFI National Archive as a Film Conservator, where she inspects, repairs, documents, and digitises film collections materials.

Her first encounter with a film archive was as a teenager, interning at the Cinemateca Brasileira. There, she became captivated by film collections care, remaining at the archive while completing her BA in Audiovisual. She later moved to Ireland to pursue an MA in Creative Process and went on to work at the IFI Irish Film Archive before relocating to the UK.

Drawn to reflective storytelling, Ana has a love for all things Agnès Varda — from beach landscapes and charismatic cats to heart-shaped potatoes. Her own practice evolves from the documentary format and often explores the space between identity, belonging, and memory.

Caitlin joined the BFI as Curatorial Archivist in 2024. She works with the Collections Development team to care for and enhance our knowledge of new and existing collections. Caitlin is currently focussed on identifying, researching and describing parts of our legacy moving image collections so they can be more discoverable for future access. This involves a lot of time up a picker in the vault, deciphering handwritten labels, and consulting long-serving colleagues. Before moving to the UK, Caitlin worked in collections development at Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision (the audiovisual archive of Aotearoa New Zealand). Outside of work, Caitlin enjoys making the most of BFI Southbank staff tickets and exploring the weird and wonderful sites of the UK.