Burlington 1442 May 2023

Editorial

Anxiety about the future of the two great photographic libraries housed in the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, can be traced back at least thirty years. In October 1992 we published an Editorial, ‘The Witt and Conway libraries under threat’, which was prompted by a demand from the University of London that the Courtauld – not yet a self-governing and self-financing entity – produce a business plan that would show how the libraries could develop commercial opportunities to offset a threatened reduction in university funding. The financial axe did not finally fall until 2009, when the Courtauld made the staff of both the Witt and the Conway redundant.[1] The ensuing public outcry forced it to maintain public access to the collections, but from that point no further additions were made to either library. 

The 1992 Editorial emphasised the Courtauld’s endeavours to make the holdings of the libraries available to a wider audience through the use of new media: as far as the Witt was concerned, ‘the whole collection has been on microfiche since 1981. And an ambitious computer indexing project begun in 1982 is now yielding impressive results’. What nobody could have foretold then was the impact of the invention just three years earlier, in 1989, of the world wide web. By 2009 the Magazine was asking, ‘Could the whole collection be digitalised? Some attempts have already been made in this direction but, as far as we know, no masterplan has been suggested. It would be a hugely expensive and time-consuming operation, needing full-time expert guidance’. It is deeply impressive that after fourteen years this seemingly impossible ambition has been fulfilled: the digitised Conway Library went online last month and the Witt is scheduled to follow by early 2025. 

It has indeed been a formidable undertaking. The Witt Library has its origins in Sir Robert and Lady Witt’s collection of photographs of Western European painting and graphic art from c.1200 onwards, which was bequeathed to the Courtauld after Sir Robert’s death in 1952. The Conway is a collection of photographs primarily of architecture, architectural drawings, the decorative arts and manuscripts assembled by Lord Conway of Allington, with his daughter Agnes, which was given to the Courtauld in 1932. By 2009 the Witt Library consisted of 2,151,862 images housed in 102,995 folders that were stored in 19,139 boxes; the Conway had 939,410 images in 57,044 folders in 9,892 boxes. The task of digitisation began with a trial project in 2017, carried out in advance of the successful application by the Courtauld to the National Lottery Heritage Fund (NLHF) in 2018 for £9.4 million towards its capital project known as ‘Courtauld Connects’; part of the award was allocated to the digitisation of the Conway, providing core funding that was supplemented by other substantial philanthropic gifts.

The trial project demonstrated the practicality of the NLHF’s desire that the project, which has been led since its inception by the Head of Digital Media at the Courtauld, Tom Bilson, should include a high degree of community engagement. As a result, it has been carried out almost entirely by volunteers from outside the Courtauld. Working with a number of charitable organisations, including BeyondAutism, the One Housing Association, the Terrence Higgins Trust and My Action for Kids, the project recruited and trained some 2,000 volunteers over five years, a third of whom had never before heard of the Courtauld. Their primary task was to photograph the images, which, as users of the libraries will know, are stuck to thin cards of uniform dimensions. Photography rather than scanning was used partly because it is much quicker and partly because it provides a truer record of the Conway’s images, which are predominantly original photographic prints. The entirety of each card, including the reverse if it contained writing of any sort, has been photographed, as were the spines of the boxes from which they were taken and the folders that contained them. 

The result is a website (photocollections.courtauld.ac.uk) that is extraordinarily rewarding to use. The arrangement of the boxes, by country and period, required some existing knowledge on the part of the library’s users; the images can now be searched by date, country and city, and there is a text search that will identify, for example, the names of architects. Additional data has been provided, including small maps showing the location of the building in the photograph. All the images are high resolution and can be enlarged on screen or downloaded (at no cost); the appearance of the photographs and the cards on which they are mounted has been recorded with tactile immediacy. It is a considerable bonus that the images can also be searched by photographers’ names. Some are well known – Robert Byron, for example (762 images) or the architectural photographer Anthony Kersting, whose entire archive of over 70,000 images forms part of the Conway. All the photographers are provided with biographies, including the large number of Courtauld staff and students who contributed their own photographs – the impressive frontrunners are Tim Benton (7,159 images) and George Zarnecki (4,522). 

The original photographs will go into store, freeing up much-needed space for the Courtauld’s book library. Foreseeing the eventual digitisation of the collection, our 2009 Editorial commented, with the Witt in mind, that digital images ‘could never replace the value of those comparisons and deductions readily made from image-by-image spreads across a table top’. Anyone who is not persuaded that high-resolution downloads provide an adequate alternative for that purpose can still request access to the originals, albeit for a fee. Given that a significant proportion of the collection consists of historic prints that are often important as photographs in their own right, and not solely as documentary records, it is in any case essential that the originals remain available for exhibitions and other scholarly purposes. 

The digitisation of the Conway is not quite complete – 42,000 negatives remain – but attention is now turning to the Witt, where the scale of the collection would have made a similar volunteer-led project impossibly lengthy. Tenders are therefore being sought for outsourcing its digitisation, on the model of a pilot project undertaken by the Dutch firm Picturae and paid for by a private benefactor, which in four months digitised some 260,000 sheets, forming more than half of the collection of photographs of British pictures between 1200 and 1799. These will shortly be available on the website. It is gratifying that such a satisfactory solution has been found to resolve what the Magazine saw in 1992 as the ‘crisis’ facing the Witt and Conway, especially as these incomparably valuable resources will in their digital form continue to be freely available to the public as their creators intended when they so generously gave their collections to the Courtauld, albeit a public infinitely greater and more diverse than they could possibly have anticipated.