By Martin Forster

BBC Tees

Thousands of images have to be painstakingly digitised

On Friday 28 January 2011 the British Steel Archive opened its doors to the public. The archive holds tens of thousands of pictures, documents and ledgers that arrived in Middlesbrough in 2006. They charted the history of the industry that turned a once unnoticed community into an engine of the Industrial Revolution. In 2009, they let BBC Tees' Martin Forster in for a rare look at the contents, and this is what he saw... This is no place to be on a hot June day. Air does not move freely around the Teesside Archives, but this is the home of some of the original, hand drawn blueprints for the Sydney Harbour Bridge. A proud history Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play. In fact, since steelmaking began on Teesside more than a century and a half ago, the area has been responsible for some of the world's greatest bridges, crossing the Yangtze, the Nile, the Bosporus and the famous Victoria Falls Bridge over the Zambezi River. Add to that specialist steelwork for modern buildings like Canary Wharf and the new World Trade Centre in New York and the value of the archive becomes clear. In 1997, Governor Chris Patten officially handed over Hong Kong to China in a lavish ceremony at the new Convention Centre, built by Teesside steel fabricators. The arch over Wembley Stadium is stuffed with Middlesbrough football shirts, a mark left by the specialist steelworkers who made it. Similarly, Teessiders talk about how the Angel of the North has, inscribed inside it: "Built for Geordies, by Teessiders". Even Winston Churchill's armoured underground war room was built from Teesside steel. It's unsurprising then that the archive that arrived on Teesside, is immense. "It goes right back to the beginning of iron and steel on Teesside and, in a way, tells the story of the growth of Teesside." Building the archive "It goes right back to the beginning of iron and steel on Teesside and, in a way, tells the story of the growth of Teesside."

Dr Joan Heggie, Teesside University "It was gifted in its entirety by British Steel back at the end of the 1980s, beginning of the 1990s," said Teesside University's Dr Joan Heggie, who runs the project. "There wasn't the space here, so some of it came and was just put on the shelves and the rest of it remained in British Steel control until we found the space in 2006. "The fact that we got involved chivvied people on to find the space to make it happen and we moved the rest of it over at that point, and this is when we realised how big it was, because when it's in storage in somebody else's store, you don't realise how big the collection is." Since 2006, a team at the archive has been meticulously unpacking, checking, logging and repairing the 700 linear feet of shelving that makes up the British Steel Collection. "I still am like a kid in a candy store, because there's so much that we still haven't appreciated, you know, the size of it. Every day we open a box it's like Christmas Day because it's new to us and it's exciting because we're seeing it for the first time with new eyes, possibly the first time that people have had their hands on it. "It's a nice chance to understand it, not just as a box of records, but that box in the context of the whole collection." The collection includes records not just from British Steel, but also from some of the great private industrial companies in the area, like Bolckow and Vaughan, Bell Brothers, Dorman Long and South Durham Iron and Steel. Jodrell Bank radio-telescope under construction

A digital record One of the greatest costs the team incurs is in digitising the images. Many are small enough to be photographed or scanned on site, but much of the material is either too big or too fragile to be scanned conventionally. Some of the Sydney Harbour Bridge blueprints are eight feet long. Work is well underway in spite of this and on July 1, 2009 for the first time ever, members of the public were able to view some of the images the team had uncovered, on the internet. The collection includes blueprints for the Sydney Harbour Bridge Dr Heggie hopes that making the images public will help fill in some of the gaps in the archive. "In most cases, we have an idea of where they are and what we are looking at, but in some cases there is nothing to tell us and this is where the public can help. "We do have a facility on the website where, if people know what they are looking at, they can click on the picture and it will come up with a comment box which ties that picture with their comment and they can send us that comment to say, 'I know what this is of,' or, 'I was there in 1955. I worked on this bridge.'"



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