*** From the Archives ***

This article is from March 31, 2008, and is no longer current.

Barnado's Historic Photographic Library Goes Digital on TopFoto

Barnardo’s unique historical image archive is being brought bang up to date and will be put on high quality digital format by leading picture library TopFoto.co.uk. Started by the charity’s founder Thomas Barnardo back in the early 1870’s, the archive is a complete photographic record of Barnardo’s children from the dirty, destitute boys dressed in rags that were taken in to the first home in Stepney Causeway to the shiny faced babies at Babies Castle in Kent.
There are half a million photos in the archive collection, which form a unique document of British social history. Evocative, sad and moving, from the very beginning the photographs were an essential part of Thomas Barnardo’s crusade to rescue destitute children. Work had begun setting up the East End Juvenile Mission in 1868, within two years the services of a photographer had been engaged and by 1874 a formal photographic department had been set up.
“Thomas Barnardo was a man ahead of his time. He realised the power of images for fundraising – and it would only be through effective fundraising that he could continue his work rescuing children from the gutters and doorsteps of London”, says Barnardo’s UK Director of Marketing & Communications, Andrew Nebel.
“Barnardo’s today still works with the UK’s most vulnerable children and it is only fitting that our image archive is brought up to date and made easily available for use”.
TopFoto will initially scan 150,000 images and a digital archive of selected material will eventually be available for licensing. Every child entering Barnardo’s was photographed and currently, 140 boxes of the original Victorian albums are being digitised.
The original images will then be returned to the precious archive, to be stored and protected as a historical testimony to the work of the great doctor. TopFoto.co.uk will be licensing Barnardo’s images which are suitable for publishing to earn income for the charity and further promote its continuing existence as one of the UK’s largest children’s charities.
“The photographs are quite remarkable – page after page of bewildered children’s faces, some defiant, some sad, but all totally compelling. The archive is a massive resource of imagery, of children, teenagers and families. As a photographic library, it’s great to be involved with the history of this influential charity”, says Alan Smith, Managing Partner of TopFoto.co.uk.
Of course, changes to the copyright law and the introduction of the Data Protection Act mean that certain photographic protocols will apply and Barnardo’s current values will be respected in allowing material from the archive to be reprinted.
The digital archive will also have huge benefits for Barnardo’s internally, as many of the images are still being requested and used extensively by our Making Connections department, following requests from ex-service users and their families.
So the digitisation of Barnardo’s image archive is set to benefit the organisation in several ways, protecting the valuable original photographs that will be carefully stored, allowing access to these images by historians and publications, and providing ex-service users and their families with valuable memories.

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