With the long, hot summer at an end, it’s time for the Leeds Civic Trust Photography Group to emerge once again, but as a new, powerful force – the Collections Archive Group. Sounds important. The Trust has an extensive collection of old photographs, slides & pictorial ephemera of Leeds, from Victorian glass plates to pictures of long-forgotten dignitaries smiling next to blue plaques
It’s a task we’ve been looking forward to & also dreading, given the scale of the work: thousands of images need to be digitised & catalogued, so we can upload them to the Leeds Libraries Leodis site and make them available to everyone.
We spent many hours in Spring sorting all the random boxes full of slides and prints into folders and collections – now it’s time to digitise them. I know that sounds a little boring, but once you see the photographs, you’ll change your mind.
Grab a file/folder of prints & suddenly your mind is full of questions – ‘where is that?’, ‘that building looks familiar’, ‘I’ve never heard of that road – where is it?’ and the classic ‘yes it was all fields round there’ etc. Then you realise 2 hours have passed by & you’ve seen sides of Leeds you never knew existed outside of Peter Mitchell photography books.
There will also be beverages and biscuits, plenty of biscuits…come and join us!
Volunteering Opportunity – Collections Archive Group
