East London theatre digital archive
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The East London Theatre Archive is an invaluable database of performing arts resources, from playbills and programmes to press cuttings and photographs. The project has created an invaluable online database with over 14,900 images and related metadata sourced from 3,368 archive items, as well as 17 contextual essays.
Executive Summary
See the East London Theatre Archive
The East London Theatre Archive preserves unique endangered theatre archive collections through digitisation and allows academic audiences to explore East London’s unique contribution to the development of theatre. 
In bringing together collections from different theatre organisations, venues and private collectors, which would otherwise be difficult if not impossible to access, it has produced one of the most significant and wonderful online resources, enhancing in a significant way the availability of digital resources in the performing arts sector. It gives researchers and students the opportunity to focus and research from 1827 to the present day.
One of the unique aspects of this project is that our partners took a step towards following a more coherent narrative, challenging notions of East London theatre as solely comprising 19th century music hall. The V&A Theatre Collections focused upon material sourced from 19th and early 20th century ‘lost’ theatres, which have now disappeared. University of East London on the other hand selected and digitised material from different collections, which dated largely from the 1970s up to 2008, relating to theatres that are still existent.
The V&A Theatre Collections digitised over 10,299 items out of a total of 2,414 metadata records from their own collections, using their in-house digitisation unit. In addition they provided 16 contextual essays written by Cathy Haill, which proved to be such a magnificent resource, not only to researchers, but were hailed also by students as most interesting, giving a beautiful account and background information of different aspects of 19th century theatre history.
Overall University of East London has digitised 4,601 items sourced from over 954 archive items. Max Communications, an external digitisation firm, was engaged to handle the digitisation process of material, sourced from Hackney Empire, Half Moon Young People’s Theatre, Hoxton Hall, Theatre Royal Stratford East, Theatre Venture, Wilton’s Music Hall, Cartoon Archetypical Slogan Theatre (CAST), as well archivist Murray Melvin and building historian John Earl, who not only contributed from his collection, but also wrote an essay describing the general history of East London theatre in the 19th to 20th centuries. Jamie Lumley has beautifully visualised the exterior and interior heritage of our partners’ venues throughout East London, which were made widely available through Flickr. He has also documented our ELTA conference on 29 January 09 at the V&A Sackler Centre, as well as the official website launch on 04 March 09. In addition Centre for e-Research (CeRch) has provided us with technical support to this date and will do so for the next 3 years. They developed the metadata schema for ELTA in the first stage of the project, based on elements drawn from existing standards. CeRch have also been responsible for ingestion and conversion of images and metadata, as well as the construction and design of the website.
The archive has created an opportunity, not only for archive material to be preserved and presented online, but also as a platform for academic debate and collaborations, by commissioning contextual essays, by hosting events, such as the East London Theatre Archive conference The East End Seen Though Performance at the V&A Sackler Centre, and the website launch. Cathy Haill, as well as John Earl, have both produced beautiful essays as part of project’s deliverable, however, it has achieved so much more than it was first anticipated and produced a magnificent insight into different areas of 19th to 20th centuries with most positive feedback from students and users interested in theatre history. The essays have truly brought the content of East London Theatre Archive together and linked disparate collections in a unique way.
Furthermore the project has created and established successful partnerships between higher education, the heritage sector, local theatres and community organisations. It allows for the archive to grow beyond the completion stage and to embrace new opportunities, nurturing further developments and future projects.
Digital images and appropriate metadata are accessible on the East London Theatre Archive website