I ought at the outset of this paper to offer two disclaimers. The first relates to my presence at a conference specifically devoted to African subjects, since my present work with the India Office Library collections brings me into very little contact with material from that continent. The second is that while the question of storage of photographs has important conservation implications, I make no claims to either qualifications or indeed expertise in this field. As regards the first point, I can claim some past acquaintance with African photographs, but would also say that for the purposes of discussing general questions of cataloguing and storage the problems are, broadly speaking, similar for all historical photographs. As to storage and conservation, such decisions as are made in this area are inevitably connected to more general cataloguing questions and I will therefore do no more than raise a few broad points in this regard.