Images saved from a skip, showing the restoration of a city devastated by the blitz, have been identified and catalogued thanks to the work of volunteers.
Thousands of photographs taken by Coventry photographer Arthur Cooper from the 1940s up to the 1960s have been digitized and released online by Coventry University.
The archive, in the form of thousands of glass negatives, was found dumped on a Coventry street and returned to publishing company Mirrorpix.
After sitting at the company’s Watford archive for nearly a decade, the 8,049 rescued images have been made available to view as part of the Coventry Digital initiative.
The archive had no information attached, explained the project’s director Dr Ben Kyneswood, so he has called on community groups and organisations to help identify people and places to add metadata.
“As soon as I opened the files I thought ‘this is just marvellous’. There were just thousands of images with no information on,” said Martin Williams.
The chairman of the Friends of Coventry Cathedral group has so far helped identify and caption about 700 of the pictures.
“It was when I saw early historic photos that I’d never seen before that I got very excited,” he said.
You can read much more in an article by Vanessa Pearce published in the BBC News web site at: https://tinyurl.com/ye22h5rs.