WORK to ensure more of the district’s photographic archive is available online is continuing, with new equipment helping experts at Bradford Industrial Museum with their project to digitise prints and negatives.

Around 3,000 archive photos are currently available online with more being gradually uploaded to the museum’s website.

There are almost 500,000 prints and negatives in the archives, with the largest collection being that of Bradford commercial photographer CH Wood.

John Ashton, an assistant at Bradford Museums Photo Archive, which is housed at the Eccleshill museum, said the progress was slow, but that new equipment in the form of a DLSR camera with stand, lights and mount, a lightbox and an iMac was allowing them to move faster.

He explained that Cleckheaton-based firm TMD Friction, manufacturers of friction material for brake systems, approached the archive a couple of years ago as they had a number of old prints with the CH Wood stamp on the back.

Upon searching through the archives, they discovered that CH Wood had taken around 10,000 pictures for the manufacturers, which used be known as Mintex.

“TMD asked if we could digitise the images and they would buy us the equipment to do it. As time passed, with a little research we found that it would be quicker and simpler to outsource the digitisation. However, as a good deal of time was needed (the best part of two years) for our volunteers to actually find all the glass and film negatives in the archive, TMD agreed that they would still buy the equipment for us,” he said.

Over the last 18 months an external firm has taken and digitised batches of a thousand or so of the Mintex images, and digital copies have been sent to TMD while the originals have been returned to the archives.

The final batch is currently being processed.

Lawrence Bleasdale, strategic sales director of TMD Friction, said: “Supporting the museum with its digitisation project was a great opportunity not only to give back to an important cultural institution, but to share the history of Mintex and the constituent companies of TMD Friction UK Ltd, with the general public.

“As a Yorkshire company spanning a history of more than 100 years, we have archives of photographs, of key people and points in history that were critical to the development of the automotive industry.

“The equipment donated by TMD Friction will process these images, as well as film acquired by the museum through other sources.”

He added: “It was a genuine pleasure to assist the photography archive department.”

A special event is being planned for the spring, where representatives from TMD will visit the archives.