Last Autumn English Heritage, and our partners the Royal Commissions on the Ancient and Historical Monuments for Scotland and Wales, were awarded £1.75m from the Heritage Lottery Fund to help conserve and catalogue part of the Aerofilms Collection and make the photographs available online. This iconic collection shows the changing face of Britain from the air and our project, called Britain from Above, focuses on the oldest part of the collection dating from 1919 to the early 1950s.
Over the last year the team have been hard at work getting the project off the ground. Our Conservation team have been making good progress on preserving the negatives. These are passed to the Digitisation team to scan, creating the digital versions of the images, enabling them to be catalogued and made available online.
Conservation
Almost 19,000 negatives have gone through the preservation process so far. This oldest part of the Collection is made up of around 48,000 glass plate negatives and approximately 47,000 film negatives, and as you'd expect from a collection which is nearly 90 years old, the negatives have a wide range of problems including broken and cracked glass, water damage, mould and dirt, as well as damage from poor quality storage materials.
The team clean the negatives before re-housing them in high quality materials suitable for the long term storage of photographs. The cleaning of the negatives is a skilled task requiring patience and an eye for detail. They also assess the condition of each negative, so that any item requiring further treatment is identified. Negatives are repaired to ensure they can be scanned without causing any damage to them.
This preservation process is an essential part of the Britain from Above project, as it not only ensures the long term care of the collection, but also means the resulting images will be of a much higher quality than before and the collection is preserved both for us and for future generations.
Next steps
The project's Web team is developing a fully interactive website which will give you free access to search, view and share information on the earliest images in the Collection. Over 18,000 will be online by the end of this year and 95,000 by the end of the project in 2014.
The next stage is to start cataloguing the images into our bespoke database, which will support the searching process once the images are online. We'll then start testing the website and we're planning to get some volunteers involved to help us at that stage.
To keep up to date with developments you can sign up to receive our regular newsletter by emailing aerofilms@english-heritage.org.uk.
