A picture perfect storage solution - Keele University

Any archiving requires a great deal of organisation and planning - so the sorting and storage of more than 5.5 million photographs was a daunting task for the team at Keele University.

Dating from November 1939 up until the end of the hostilities in May 1945, the aerial reconnaissance photographs are a unique record of Western Europe, covering all of former occupied Europe, as well as the Northern shore of the Mediterranean. Transferred from the Allied Central Interpretation Unit at RAF Medmenham to a specially designed building at the university, they now form part of the Public Record Office.

In order to make the prints accessible to as many people as possible, an online ordering system has been set up, enabling interested parties to order digital images or hard copies of the photographs. Careful indexing and logical filing was needed so that any one picture could be located quickly and easily and Rackline, specialists in complete storage solutions, was brought in to recommend the most appropriate storage system.

Multitrak mobile units were chosen for their ease of use and installation and space saving benefits. At more than eleven metres long, they provide ample room for the storage of both existing pictures and future collections.

Phase 1 of the installation comprised of 182 bays of mobile shelving providing 1495.2 linear metres of storage.

Phase 2 was 80 bays of mobiles shelving comprising of 672 linear metres and 36 bays of static shelving providing 243.6 linear metres.

Alan Williams, from Keele University, said, “As well as the photographs taken by the allies in World War Two, we are also gradually receiving aerial pictures from all over the world, including German images of Eastern Europe taken during the same period.

“We get three to four hundred requests for photographs every year from people as diverse as archaeologists, historians, archivists, lawyers and municipal authorities and eventually all the images will be available to order online. This means it is important that they can be incorporated into the same indexing system and with Rackline’s solution this was obviously not going to be a problem.”

Rackline is the leading manufacturer of mobile storage systems in Europe with an expanding portfolio of clients and 15,000 installations in a wide variety of sectors including architects, financial organisations, legal firms and the public sector.

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