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The opportunity to digitize a collection such as ours is an amazing thing. It allows for material of local and national interest to be preserved for posterity and to be shared on the internet with a whole world of people who would otherwise have no access to such a unique collection. For us, as researchers of the sitters and places depicted, it enables the access and identification of sources in faraway places that could potentially uncover information otherwise out of our grasp. In our case, these fragile glass plates could so easily have been lost, but even after their rescue and relocation to the Sutton Archives in 1978 they remained stored away, uncatalogued and largely unknown for close to 40 years. The nature of this collection and its fragile state means it is unlikely that they would ever have been ‘available’ to the public without the opportunity that digitisation offers. Digitisation will not only preserve them for posterity, it will bring them back to life. But of course, as with many opportunities of this sort, you only get one chance to get things right. The kind of investment that is required for a project of this type, both financial, and of time and commitment means that there are a number of things of which we must remain aware and must be careful to avoid or take into account.

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