Revealing the Past: Unlocking the Treasures project, funded by The James Reckitt Library Trust, enabled us to digitise a set of 1800 glass plate negatives, photographs taken by Hull City Council’s Health Department covering a period from the 1880s through to the 1930s. Access to the original glass plate negatives is restricted due to their fragile nature and although a small proportion of them had been digitised 20 years ago, the quality of the files restricted what we could do with them.

Funding from The Trust enabled us to engage Townsweb to digitise all 1800 plates including broken and damaged ones. The detail is incredible – we have already blown some of the images up for our current exhibition allowing us to reveal aspects and details we hadn’t noticed. With many of the images previously unseen, we are now looking at ways in which we can engage users and provide access to this collection.

Carol Tanner, Access & Collections Manager