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Picture Sheffield website redesigned


History dude

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Earlier today I was looking on the Picture Sheffield site at some aerial photos for Park Hill and I got about 14 results. With the exception of one which had no picture at all, not even a thumbnail, they had thumbnails of the pictures. But when you went on them, there was no image at all. I found that over half of the results were like this! It's not the first time this has happened either. It crops up a lot. The issue is all down to copyright. With the owners not allowing the zoom images. You can't even order a paid for copy either. The thumbnails are no good at all either, especially on aerial pictures. You can't really tell what it is!

Now I know that many owners still wish to make money or not have the images showing up on loads of websites without being paid. But that doesn't mean that Sheffield Archives should upload the images to that publicly funded website. Yes they can store them and keep them safe, till such times the copyright has expired. But noway should even a thumbnail be uploaded to Picture Sheffield if the public can't see a decent sized image. Those images already on should be removed, telling the owner if they want them on the site they have to agree to the zoom images. I think Sheffield Archives has plenty of images that have no restriction on being zoomed and they should uploaded them first. Having no images to see is a waste of the resource of the site.

I have sent an e-mail to Sheffield Archives on this issue a few hours ago. I'm hoping they will take action to correct this issue. I will let you know of any reply.   

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Here's the reply:

Yes, I understand it can be frustrating not being able to view a zoomed image due to copyright restrictions.  A few copyright owners who let the Library Service have copies of their images (before Picture Sheffield was created, and in most cases, before the internet came along) set restrictions on their image re-use.  We have corresponded with owners to clarify how we treat their photographs in the internet age and they have given us their view.  It is only a handful of owners who have specified restrictions (though they do have a reasonable number of images on the database which accounts for your results.  One in particular photographed large parts the east side of Sheffield in the 1960s and 1970s, but his son runs a commercial photographic company – hence the limits on viewing on Picture Sheffield.

It is less usual for restrictions to be placed on images we receive now; we encourage donors to give full access to images and in 99% of cases they do. 

We have considered not putting restricted images up on Picture Sheffield at all, though for the following reasons we chose not to:

Customers (and staff) know that an image does exist in our collections if you can view it (even just a thumbnail) online. With no references to the image at all on Picture Sheffield customers (and staff) wouldn’t easily know an image was in the collections. We periodically review restricted images, or they might eventually fall out of copyright; in that case we can just turn the zoomed image back on at the click of a mouse. In most cases, if not all, you can purchase a copyright image – just not through Picture Sheffield. We put the customer in touch with the copyright owner who normally supplies a print (for a fee) Over the years far fewer people visit the physical library – they only access our images online. More and more images are being supplied to us in digital form - we need a database like Picture Sheffield to store and manage these digital files. Running two systems – Picture Sheffield and a system to manage undigitized images would add an administrative and organisational burden to our small team.  As I’m sure you appreciate, over the years our team has been reduced and we try as far as we are able to be more efficient in the way we work to maximise our small staff resource.

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