The National Trust launched a new collections website just before Christmas. It claims to currently contain records for some 736,334 items.
The basic search is easy and yields good results, but the real power comes from the filtering that you can apply. I must say though, even as a website professional I found it a little cumbersome and difficult to get used to at first. But the rewards are worth a little patience and experimentation ...
A quick search for 'carte de visite' at http://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk returns 1544 objects, 859 of which have online images.
You can of course also try other searches, for example by name. Like any online catalogue it is only as good as the metadata, so for example they list six results searching for 'Claudet', but only two if you specifically choose Antoine Claudet from the 'maker' option. Yet at the same time, there are results such as this one - http://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/97259 which simply has the maker as Adelaide Gallery Strand and without the photographic format recorded.
In what I feel is a pretty unique feature with such sites, you can very easily search by a particular property/collection, which for photo history people can only lead to one thing - the 18,564 items listed for the Fox Talbot Museum, including 6,669 online photographs but also no end of images of cameras, tripods and the like - http://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/search/collection/Fox-Talbot-Museum,-Wiltshire-%28Accredited-Museum%29/1
Sadly there is no way to save or share specific searches, nor to add comments or give feedback about any item. But hopefully that will come in due course.
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