Courtauld alumnus and Head of Digital Media Tom Bilson (Grad Dip 1991; MPhil 2000) leads 2,000 volunteers on a journey to make The Courtauld’s extensive and valuable collections available to all.
Over the last five years, the largest public inclusion project The Courtauld has ever led has been quietly developing under the careful eye of the Head of Digital Media, Tom Bilson. The ambitious project to digitise the vast collections that are held within The Courtauld libraries includes material from the Conway Library and the Anthony Kersting archive. Whilst The Conway Library contains nearly 1 million photographs of world architecture, architectural drawings, sculpture, decorative arts, and manuscripts, the Kersting archive is home to over 160,000 images documenting architecture from nearly every European country, Asia, New Zealand, and the Middle and Far East.
With such a vast collection to uncover, The Courtauld enrolled the support of a wide range of volunteers from across the art and charity sectors including CoolTan Arts, the Terrence Higgins Trust, The One Housing Foundation, YMCA and My Action for Kids. This ambitious project could not have been made possible without the support of the National Lottery Heritage Fund (NLHF) and introduced new audiences to The Courtauld through the growing
volunteer network. As a result, new insights into the collection have been discovered with a collection of high-resolution images now available online for all to engage with, befitting of
Samuel Courtauld’s vision of “art for all”.
Continue reading in the latest issue of The Courtauld News…