A member of Preston Digital Archive together with myself have recently undertaken the task of taking digital copies of all the historical photographs the club owns. One of the main reasons being that many are very old and in particularly poor condition. To that end Lancashire Archives have kindly offered to store them along with other items of ephemera we own in a safe environment. The memorabilia remains our property and we have full access to everything.
The great bonus this offers the club is that we now have instant access to around 250 photographs, a collection which is ever growing.
We are anxious to collect other images and memorabilia relating to the club in years gone by that members and the general public are holding, and would encourage people to get in touch to either loan their possessions to us for copying or if they wish, donate them to a good home.
One instance of such an occurrence is that a gentleman living in London contacted the club regarding a photograph he had of his grandfather pictured in a group of players from 1911. We already had a small postcard copy of the image but the original photo from the players ancestor was donated to us with a very nice letter giving some historical details of the player in question.
Our photographs are currently being loaded into a set of their own on the Preston Digital Archive and this can be viewed as the collection grows by following the link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/rpsmithbarney/sets/72157638569133644/ It should be noted that we own the copyright of our images and this is engrained into the photographs on Preston Digital Archives website.
The general site: http://www..flickr.com/photos/rpsmithbarney/page3/ currently holds over eleven thousand photographs relating to Preston and anyone who hasn’t viewed this and has any sort of interest in the history of Preston is encouraged to dip in. The site holds sets under various headings similar to ours such as Pubs and Hotels, Preston Railway Scenes and Preston North End for example.
People are encouraged to add comments, corrections or further information to our photographs as they go live and as we still require information on a number of these, such as missing names and dates etc. it is intended to put these photographs out for display at the clubhouse on Friday the 17th of January from 12 noon until 9pm when I’ll be in attendance to take notes.
Digger.
