Safeguarding Our Cultural Heritage

It might be surprising for some, but art conservators currently have a greater range of techniques to investigate the Mona Lisa, painted over 500 years ago, than their film counterparts do to work on films created four centuries later. Moving images technologies are significantly less understood than objects that are several centuries older. However, that is all about to change.

Today, the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and BFI celebrate the launch of the Research Infrastructure for Conservation and Heritage Science (RICHeS) programme, a major £80 million research and innovation investment from the UKRI Infrastructure Fund and delivered by AHRC. The RICHeS programme will support the latest technology and scientific equipment needed to unlock the potential of existing heritage collections and provide access to untapped cultural assets to safeguard and grow the UK’s £29 billion heritage sector for future generations.

At the BFI National Archive we’re establishing a £1 million Moving Image Conservation Research Laboratory (MICRL) to safeguard UK moving image collections at the BFI and archive partners across the UK. This unique facility will be equipped with state-of-the-art instrumentation dedicated to the scientific analysis of film materials, to improve understanding of material composition and deterioration processes of film, video and paper-based collections….