Courtauld completes huge digitisation project
Nearly 2,000 volunteers have helped digitise the Conway Library photographic collection at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, in a project that has taken more than five years.
The Conway Library is a collection of 1 million images, the majority of which have never been seen by the public. The library’s main focus is photographs of world architecture, but it also includes images of sculpture, paintings, stained glass, manuscripts and textiles.
The Conway Library photographic collection will be available to explore online via the Courtauld website from 28 April.
The volunteers have catalogued and photographed every single object in the Conway Library to open it up to the public for free. There have also been about 12,000 remote volunteers working on the project.
Tom Bilson, the head of digital media at the Courtauld, said: “There has been a huge emphasis on community engagement for the project. We had a modest aim of working with 200 volunteers and we are now eight short of 2,000.”
Bilson said that a third of the volunteers had never heard of Courtauld before, but saw it as the chance to learn digital skills and meet other people. The Courtauld has worked with a number of organisations on the volunteering, including BeyondAutism, the Terrence Higgins Trust, the One Housing Association and My Action for Kids.
The heart of the Conway Library is the private collection of journalist, mountaineer, politician, and art historian Lord Conway of Allington, which came to the Courtauld in 1932. Since then, the library has been developed continuously as a teaching and research collection.
The Conway collection includes the archive of photographer Anthony Kersting (1916-2008), which consists of more than 160,000 images documenting the architecture of almost every European country, as well as other locations around the world.
The library also features the De Laszlo Collection, an archive of 22,000 glass plates that includes images of works by major early 20th-century British artists.
The National Lottery Heritage Fund part-funded the digitisation of the Conway Library.