Herbert was a projectionist at various London cinemas from 1969 to 1973, before spending sixteen years as a technician in audio-visual education. He joined the
British Film Institute's National Film Theatre in 1989, first as deputy then as head of Technical Department. This included responsibility for projection at the
London Film Festival and the Museum of the Moving Image. He was also a development team member for the
BFI IMAX from 1995 to 1997. In the mid-1990s, Herbert set up a small publishing business, The Projection Box, with partner Mo Heard. They published books and booklets on early film and media history, including titles written by Herbert himself, notably a biography of Edwardian visual media pioneer Theodore Brown (1997) and
Industry, Liberty and a Vision (1998), on inventor and political theorist
Wordsworth Donisthorpe. As an editor he compiled a trio of three-volume sets on pre-cinema, early film and early television for
Routledge, and co-edited
Magic Images,
Servants of Light and
The Encyclopaedia of the Magic Lantern, all published by the Magic Lantern Society, for whom he was research officer 1988–2000. He produced a number of websites, including ''
Who's Who of Victorian Cinema (based on the 1996 book co-edited with Luke McKernan), The Compleat Muybridge
and The Optilogue''. He was a consultant on the development of moving image museums in Dubai and Qatar, and was a visiting research fellow at
Kingston University, home to the
Eadweard Muybridge archive. He was a board member of the
Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture, University of Exeter, 1997–2000. He was a technical consultant on two feature films,
Merchant-Ivory's
The Golden Bowl (2000) and
Martin Scorsese's
Hugo (2011). Many items from Stephen Herbert's collection, including artefacts and research papers, were donated to The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum at the University of Exeter and can be accessed for research. Similarly, a collection of more than 500 items including books, research papers, and original artefacts connected to the early history of motion pictures were donated to Leeds Beckett University where they became the foundation for the university’s Early Cinema Research Group. These, too, can be accessed by researchers. ==Selected bibliography==