The University of Portsmouth’s School of Media and Performing Arts, in collaboration with University of the Arts London, has been awarded an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) grant to research the history of British music video since the 1960s.  This 2-year project, led by Dr Justin Smith (Principal Investigator, Portsmouth) and Dr Emily Caston (Co-investigator, UAL) will assemble a panel of industry executives and creatives from record labels and production companies to work with an advisory committee of academics to select a canon of music video titles for conservation within the BFI's National Archive which will be distributed to the general public by Soda Pictures as a box set DVD and exhibited across the UK in four national cinema screening sessions with leading music video curator David Knight (BUG, editor Promo News TV, curator UK Music Video Awards). The project will also create the first national database of British music videos free to access at the BFI and British Library. With original masters donated by record labels and production companies we will create two new collections of major national significance, at the BFI National Archive and British Library respectively, to accompany this database. These will be documented and analysed in a journal special issue, and a book relating the as yet untold story of British music video art.

We seek to appoint a full-time Research Assistant (grade 4) on a fixed-term contract for 24 months. Responsible to the PI and CI, the Research Assistant will collate music video metadata, will conduct archival research, will prepare programme notes and presentations for focus groups, will contribute to the research interviews and industry panels, will analyse the Chart Show sample of programs and BPI sales data, and will contribute to the project’s dissemination activities including social media. The Research Assistant will be required to work especially closely with the CI in London. It is expected that the Research Assistant will make a distinctive contribution to the intellectual life of the project and its outputs, as well as having an important role in data gathering and assisting resource production.