The Special Collections and Archives Department has been awarded significant funding to digitise the Shannon Development photographic archive.
UL’s Special Collections has been awarded around €125,000 (£107,365) in funding from the Wellcome Trust to catalogue, conserve, digitise and increase accessibility to the key photographic archive, which boasts around 25,000–36,000 original photographic negatives.
The funding is part of an overall award of £427,809 granted by Wellcome to the collaborative project ‘The New Jerusalems: post-war New Town archives in Britain and Ireland’, granted to a network of archives services to catalogue and conserve eleven post-war new town collections.
This funding award from Wellcome is significant for UL, as it will allow the Glucksman Library to hire dedicated project staff and to purchase the necessary materials to catalogue, digitise and rehouse the original photographic negatives taken by the Shannon Development photographers of Shannon Town, Shannon Industry and Shannon Airport.
The Shannon Development Photographic Archive was transferred to the Glucksman Library at UL in 2014. The collection comprises approximately 250,000 photographic items, including press cuttings, reports, brochures spanning over five decades.