In the Picture - Making the most of images inside & outside your collection

Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend our local CILIP Study Group’s workshop on making the best use of digital images in library collections, at CILIPs headquarters in London.

As part of the day I got to hear from three people really pushing the envelope with the scope and innovation of their image archive projects…

Beata Bradford – Britain from Above

Beata Bradford, Activity Team Leader from English Heritage, spoke about expanding the ground-breaking, HLF-funded Britain from Above (BFA) project, through the purchase of the Aerofilms Ltd Aerial Photographic archive. She spoke specifically about some of the challenges that the team faced integrating the 95,000 strong photograph collection into the BFA archive.

Huw Lewis – Bracknell Forest Libraries

Second to speak was Bracknell Forest Libraries’ Community Librarian, Huw Lewis, who gave a fascinating talk on the process of publishing part of his library’s collections on the social network, Flickr.

Sarah Gould – Merton Libraries and Heritage

Sarah Gould, Service Manager of Merton Library & Heritage Service, unfortunately wasn’t able to attend to showcase the fantastic work of the Merton Memories project as planned.

However, the Chair of the event did give an account using Sarah’s presentation; explaining how the project digitised over 15,000 photographs (representing over 100 years of Merton’s local heritage) and made them available online as a dedicated heritage website.

The project used a large force of volunteers to catalogue and attach metadata to the images, as well as TownsWeb’s digitisation services, web design, and our own PastView digital asset management system to organise the digital archive.

You can watch Sarah Gould talking about the Merton Memories project in-depth in our interview here.