Copmanthorpe, a village on the edge of York, has a collection of over 2000 photographs of village people and places going back to the late 19th Century. A large part of the archive was the work of Ernest Sanderson, who lived in Copmanthorpe and took and collected photographs of the village. After his death, Ernest’s collection ended up in the care of Copmanthorpe parish council. Since 2018, an annual photography competition has sought contemporary photos of the village to be added to the archive. However, whilst the Ernest Sanderson collection was digitised and some information about the photos was recorded, the archive itself was not easily accessed or searched being mainly stored on external hard disk drives.
In 2025, Copmanthorpe parish council approved my proposed project to make the archive more discoverable, engaging, and impactful. This has involved facilitating the cataloguing of the archive by a group of local volunteers, publishing the archive online, and increasing interest in the archive through sharing images on relevant social media. I developed the metadata structure for the archive (based on the recognised Dublin Core cataloguing standard), configured the online software (Omeka), and uploaded archive images and associated metadata. I now provide ongoing design and technical support, help with community engagement, and comprehensive documentation to the voluntary group, who are enthusiastically growing and sharing the archive.
Explore the Copmanthorpe digital archive.