Home

Friends of High Wycombe Libraries

Supporting our local community libraries

Events

Future Events

Sharing Wycombe's Old Photographs (SWOP) Project

High Wycombe Library has been awarded a Heritage Lottery Fund Grant of £50,000 to digitise and web enable three collections of photographs totalling over 15,000 prints, currently based at the Bucks Free Press, the Wycombe Museum and the Library. 

The plan is to digitise twice, once at approximately 96 dpi for web enabling and at around 600 dpi for archival purposes. An external company will be employed for this part of the programme. The Internet version will look something like the present Bucks photos on the web and will act as an index to the archival version. We will be able to provide copies of the photographs for a small fee where we have the copyright holders permission. We also plan to produce education packs and reminiscence packs for schools and retirement homes in the district. These will be supported by maps, census material and newspaper cuttings where appropriate.

Volunteers have come forward to catalogue the photographs using a data collection programme specifically written for the purpose by one of the "Friends of High Wycombe Library". 

The information will then be transferred to the database used by Wycombe Museum and the County Museum called MODES which will enable us to search for a "woman on a bicycle in Marlow High Street in 1900" or "the opening of the Majestic Theatre in 1930".