Educational Trustees Meeting Nov 2017

Funding The History Project has rarely sought direct financial assistance. We run our whole operation on a financial shoestring backed up by an enormous amount of hard work and good will from our members. Until now the History Project has had no separate legal status, but has simply operated as an informal voluntary initiative under the auspices of the union. Now we are establishing ourselves as an independent non-profit organisation, The British Entertainment History Project, which will allow us to pursue our own fund-raising in ways which were not previously possible. None of this means that links with the union are being cut: at each step BECTU has supported this process, and the Chair of the Project continues to be Mike Dick who is an elected member of BECTU’s Executive Committee. For the first time the History Project is appealing for financial help in extending and sustaining our archive activities. If we could build up our financial resources it would enable us to broaden our work geographically to other parts of the UK. We would be able to buy new equipment - cameras, sound, storage systems, new software to enable easier access to our interviews both online and in the archive. We want to publicise our valuable work and to publish a selection of our interviews. In order to do this successfully we need to produce transcripts of all of our interviews. Comprehensive transcripts of our archive are now vital. We still only have transcripts of about 150 of our 700 interviews. We are currently experimenting with new voice recognition technology to help speed up this process. The results so far are extremely encouraging. We believe that these new initiatives will significantly enhance knowledge and awareness of the history of the British entertainment industry in this country and encourage the wider usage of the archive among students, researchers and members of the general public who are interested in the history and development of our industries and the men and women who worked in them. These interviews tell us about the challenges they had to overcome, the skills they employed, the enduring human relationships they forged as Britain developed into one of the world’s major centres of the film and television industries. . Now the current generation of volunteers can really begin to fulfill the vision of the original History Project pioneers - to make these valuable recordings accessible for future generations.