Skip to Content

Photographs of People

Pictorial Collection Catalogue

The Pictorial Collection consists of photographs, postcards, slides, albums, glass negatives, illustrations and artworks, which are catalogued or indexed by locality, name of person or subject. The level of cataloguing or indexing varies and depends on how much is known about each photograph. To protect the original photographs, a large proportion of the collection has been photocopied and bound into a series of volumes which are available for viewing in the reading room. There are a great many photographs in the collection which relate to people and it is possible that photographs of ancestors can be located via the index. The Pictorial Collection Catalogue is a card catalogue housed in the Battye Library Reading Room. The bulk of the Pictorial Collection, c1,000,000 photographs, is still accessed via this catalogue. Access to the photographs is mainly by subject, place name or personal name. Over 70,000 photographs have now been digitised and can be searched online.