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Funded and Managed by
City of London Corporation
The London Archives

Mediatheque: Space for digital research

Images, film, audio
meditheque-computer-at-the-london-archives

What is a Mediatheque?

A Mediatheque, or ‘media library’, is a place dedicated to exploring and researching audio and visual material. The term 'Mediatheque' was first used during the 1980s. This was when the importance of film, video and audio material to historians and cultural researchers was finally recognised.

The Mediatheque at The London Archives

Our Mediatheque provides on demand access to the films and audio recordings in our collection. It also allows you to access our photographic collections and the digitised images of our of maps and plans.

The Mediatheque provides a dedicated space for researchers who come to The London Archives to access digital collections. You can view images alongside our sound and video collections to build a rich, multi-sensory picture of our capital city.

Using the Mediatheque

There are three sections within the Mediatheque space.

The Big Screen

Visitors, or groups, can experience films and short videos from our collection on the big screen.

The Terminals

Our eight, individual terminals provide access to our digital image collections, film and sound archives. Using these terminals you can access: • Digital scans of archival documents • The London Picture Archive – Researcher access. This allows you to search across digital scans of the visual material in our collection (prints, maps, photographs etc). This on-site version includes many items which are not rights cleared and therefore cannot be made available online.

  • Digital records and content from our previous exhibitions
  • Films. Our selection of films includes films which are not copyright cleared. These cannot be made available on our YouTube channel or on the world wide web
  • Oral History – Explore our collection of oral history recordings, including:
    • Interviews with staff employed at Peabody Estates in London in the early to mid-twentieth century
    • Interviews with six ex-mariners, part of the Black Experience Archives Trust (BEAT)'s work.

London’s Maps

Explore digitised images of our collection of large maps, each documenting the geographical landscape of London over six centuries. Look out for the map cabinets too in the Information Area that have a range of facsimiles including the Alan Godfrey reprints of old Ordnance Survey (OS) maps for the Greater London area.