About

Welcome to the Lighting Design Archive. A project designed to archive and make freely available materials related to lighting design for performance.

Who runs the archive?

You can see a full list of contibutors to this site here. The project founder is Anthony Arblaster, and is a project of the Lighting Department at RADA. We are always looking for help maintainting the site on GitHub or the repository community on Humanities Commons.

The archive is only possible because of the work of the team who built Humanities Commons. As the repository of the files, their work is vital.

Why Archive?

Many individual theatres and organisations have formal or informal archive programmes to store materials used in the creation of thier works. While large organisations may make this material avaialble to researchers, students and artists, many smaller organisations do not. Small theatres and one-off projects don’t have the ability to store this information.

Preserving technical and artistic documentation of lighting designs ensure that other artists, students, researchers and historians can understand the whole picture of performance lighting design. While one individual lighting design may not be historically significant, you never know how it might influence, support or contibute to learning.

The archive is for all professional performance lighting designs. In order to capture the full range of work done by LDs, designers at all scales, genres and experience should contribute.

The Nuts and Bolts

This site is just a public facing access point for files stored with the Humanities Commons. The Humanities Commons is a open repository for humanities data, and is used for storing, sharing and providing open access to materials. The repository champions open access, sharing information, and promoting community.

The Humanities Commons stores works across the humanities, and anyone can join and share materials relivant to the humanities. While it is focus on research, it recognises the broadest definition of that term, and therefore includes artistic works.

Only work you created or have the rights to should be stored in the repository.

If you have the rights and you want to make your files publicly accessible you can follow the instructions on the contributing page.