Head Wrightson Project Week One

It’s been a great first week for The Head Wrightson Photographic Archive project. After many emails and phone calls it was lovely to get most of our volunteers together in person for an initial training session on handling and conserving photo negatives. Helen Kendall came over from Teesside Archives to deliver a fascinating talk running through the different types of photo negatives that have been used over the years and the methods to preserve them for as long as possible. It was good to hear that the Head Wrightson collection isn’t likely to spontaneously combust like older film types!

Later on our scanners arrived, with two new PCs coming next week ready to start the hard work of digitising 16,000 negatives. As the first picture loaded up it did feel like we should have a member of the Royal Family smashing a bottle of champagne on the side of the scanner but that might conflict with archival standards best practice. One down only 15,999 to go!

Our Twitter and Facebook pages were also launched (https://twitter.com/HeadWrightson & https://www.facebook.com/HeadWrightson/ ) and very quickly we had an example of what the project is all about.