Speakers - Janet McBain

Title:

Preserving Scotland’s Buildings on Film

Precis:

Janet McBain will provide an overview of the filmed record of Scotland’s post-war architecture.

Biography

Janet McBain is Curator, Scottish Screen Archive. She is a graduate in Scottish history, and  former survey officer for the National Register of Archives Janet McBain joined the Scottish Film Council in 1976 at the inception of what was to become the Scottish Screen Archive. Since then she has overseen the development of the archive into Scotland’s national collection of some 35,000 reels of non-fiction film relating to all aspects of Scottish life and has been researching and promoting the history of  film production and cinema exhibition in Scotland.

She is the author of ‘Pictures Past - Recollections of Scottish Cinema Going’ (pub Moorfoot 1985) and contributor of essays, articles and conference papers on many aspects of film in Scotland. For ten years she was the guest presenter on Grampian Television’s film history series The Way it Was.  She is a member of the Scottish Records Association, Business Archives Council for Scotland and represents Scotland  on the Film Archive Forum UK and in the  International Federation of Film Archives.

As curator in charge of moving image collection  she is a member of the senior curatorial team at the  National Library of Scotland, the Scottish Screen Archive having transferred to NLS in April  2007. Access to the Catalogue is available here.