Volunteers at Chester Photographic Survey have been collecting images of Chester's streets and buildings from the 1960's up to the present day. 25,000 of these images are on slide film or are black and white dia-positives and negatives. We believe that this valuable historical collection, which charts changes in the City over the last 60 years, should be made available to the public. CPS requires professional image scanning equipment to digitise this collection and any future historic collections which may be donated to us. . Once scanned, these images will be made available via a new, searchable web portal and stored in an additional cloud storage account. From this new public access portal images can be printed for exhibitions, public presentations and many other public uses. The original images on film are safely held at the Cheshire Archives, but are currently not visible due to their format.

What we'll deliver:

• After editing, approximately 20,000 digitised images in colour and black and white
• High quality scanning equipment available to digitise future community held historic image collections
• Web site for historic and existing digital collections merged to form the largest public collection of Chester images

Why it's a great idea:

Chester Photographic Survey plans to offer public presentations to community groups such as lecture societies, U3A and History Groups with these images and this resource could be used by schools to illustrate the changes the city has gone through, using presentations or printed materials. CPS intends to print images for public exhibitions and will work closely with Cheshire West and Chester Council to look for public sites for image presentation. Public engagement is key to the success of making this collection into an active digital resource and we are actively seeking new volunteers. Making these historic images visible offers Chester residents an opportunity to look back at its recent history and reflect on the changes made and the way forward for this beautiful historical city. Schools can access image sets for presentations and display as an educational tool to support community understanding, building an awareness of how our urban environment changes within a lifetime.

Steps to get it done:

• Purchase of Scanner and attachments
• Training of volunteers to produce high quality scans
• Scanning of all black and white images
• Scanning of all colour transparencies
• Metadata insertion to all scanned image files.
• Uploading all completed scanned images to web portal and second cloud storage location.

This valuable historical resource will be available for free public viewing and public exhibitions. However, any commercial access requested would be charged for to bring in a small income to maintain and grow the collection in future years.