By way of introduction, and to put the body of this paper in context, it may be helpful to say a few words about the National Army Museum and its Collections.

The Museum received its Royal Charter in 1960 when it was established at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and moved to its present location in Royal Hospital Road, Chelsea, where it opened to the public in 1971. Under the terms of its Charter, the Museum is responsible for collecting, preserving and interpreting items relating to the the history of the British Army from 1485 to the present day, the Indian Army until 1947, and the land forces of Britain's overseas possessions until their respective dates of independence.

Photography which has traditionally been classified as “ethnographic” or “anthropological” has received considerable attention in recent years and some of the major contributions to the field have been on African images, presenting analytical histories of photographic production and use, for instance Geary's analysis of photographs of Bamum in the Cameroon Grassfields (1988). I am not going to review this literature or the particular issues raised by it as there have been various such useful exercises, for instance Geary (1991) and Roberts (1988); nor am I going to consider the merits of specific collections because this would merely regurgitate much of what was said on the subject, and subsequently published (Roberts 1989a), during a two day seminar convened by Andrew Roberts which took place at S.O.A.S. London in 1988.

For the majority of Europeans not fortunate to be bom and raised in Africa the ‘discovery’ of the extraordinary fauna of that distant continent frequently occurs, nevertheless, remarkably early in their lives. In recent times it may be acquired in part through the medium of television. In Britain this began around the middle of the present century when natural history programmes shot in monochrome in exotic locations across the world were first shown. The success of these programmes coincided with an embryonic awakening in the scientific community to the depletion of some of the world's natural resources, and none more so than in Africa.

Africa had long been of interest in Europe - as we see in the herbals of Charles de l'Escluse (1601), & Mathias de l'Obel (1650). Kew's interest in Africa stems from the earliest days of the Gardens, which were set up in 1759 for Princess Augusta under the supervision of William Aiton, advised by Lord Bute & Sir John Hill. Hill's Hortus Kewensis, published in 1768 lists many trees, shrubs and herbaceous plants from Africa, describes Fritillaria longifolia as new from the Cape of Good Hope and gives a coloured plate of it.

Princess Augusta died in 1772, and her Gardens passed to King George III (Farmer George), who appointed Sir Joseph Banks as botanical director. Banks was sharply aware of the worth of field exploration - he had himself just returned from 3 years with Captain Cook on ‘The Endeavour’ during which they explored the South Pacific and coastal Australia.

Obviously by the very nature of the output of BBC Television, we hold a very wide range of programmes and are by no means a specialist Africa collection. Our specialism is the media. This paper covers the range of material we hold - age; subject; production source and formats and then looks briefly at the professional problems this material poses in terms of intake, storage and subject cataloguing and indexing. Finally, it gives you a brief introduction to the use made of the library.

The Library's prime responsibility is to store and document BBC produced and transmitted programmes and any other footage that may be of reuse or archival value. However, the library is very closely involved in the production process, assisting production staff by documenting all their recordings as they are made and edited in the post production process right up to transmission.

The Library of the Royal Commonwealth Society, born in 1868 as the Colonial Society, known successively as the Royal Colonial Institute, the Royal Empire Society and finally, and affectionately, as the RCS, is now the largest special collection of Cambridge University Library. I have told elsewhere the dramatic story of the Library's rescue from dispersal and disaster and its transfer from the old imperial heart of London, near Trafalgar Square, to Cambridge. Visual images paid an important part in the campaign to save the Library and, of all the material in its rich and varied collections, it was perhaps the photographs that most caught the imagination of the media and benefactors. The Library's visual resources were already well-known to and well-quarried by a select band of academics and picture researchers. The Library Appeal brought them to the attention of a wider public.

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.

The South African Library is the oldest such institution in South Africa, having been founded in Cape Town in 1818, but its Iconographic Section was not officially established until 1986. Demand for research and copying services has increased steadily since 1990, and we are now receiving a gratifying number of enquiries from overseas picture researchers and specialists.

I have been Iconographic Librarian for about four years, which is not nearly long enough for me to pose as an expert, but in our country there are so few specialists in picture research that those of us who work with pictures soon achieve specialist status, whether warranted or not.

Our collection consists of some 100,000 images, mainly photographs, limited to Southern Africa and covering subjects of socio-cultural interest. It is a reference and research collection intended primarily to provide visual information, and it therefore includes copies of material held by other institutions.