Photography
Mary Gillham was a keen photographer - which is great for the Mary Gillham Archive Project as we have a fantastic record of her life! Mary's photos are valuable in many ways - they are a reflection of the social, cultural and political situation of the time, record the changes in landscape through natural and human induced changes and act as biological records depicting a species in a location on a certain date.
Slides were an essential tool for Mary when teaching or delivering talks and she would cram slides a projector and screen and maybe other teaching aids like her personal favourite Coco de mer or collections of shells gathered from beaches around the world.
During the course of the project we scanned over 37 000 slides which Mary left in her archive and conscientiously, Mary wrote a description of what the slide depicted on the face each one! A major task during the project was to try and capture this information so that the slides can be viewed and searched online. Many volunteers both in the office and part of our online supporters helped to transcribe these slides and this remains one of the most exciting, intriguing and illuminating aspects of Mary's archive.
You can see the digital versions of Mary's photos in a few places:
The People's Collection Wales is a project of the National Library Wales. During the course of the Mary Gillham Archive Project People's Collection Wales loaned us an A3 scanner to help scan each of the slides as well as oral history recording equipment to capture people's memories of Mary (thank you!). Mary's photos can be seen by following this link.
We also uploaded all of Mary's pictures to Flickr where they can be browsed and downloaded. Like all of Mary's archive, it is copyright free and so all of the images a free to download and use.
The slides, along with all the other physical materials within Mary's archive will be stored by Glamorgan Archives and be accessible to anyone who wishes to look through it.
The slides which depict interesting geology can be seen on the British Geological Survey's GeoScenic page.