Butler photographs on the map

The Library is delighted to launch a new online resource which aims to put the nineteenth-century photographer Samuel Butler on the map.

Butler was a prolific and skilled photographer, comparable to his better-known contemporaries Zola and Strindberg. More than 2000 of Butler’s original photographic prints and glass plate negatives, produced in the 1880s and 1890s, are preserved in the Samuel Butler Collection at St John’s College. Now it is possible to view some of these evocative and charming images online.

Butler on the Map is an interactive photo gallery hosted on Historypin, which uses the Google Maps interface to enable institutions and individuals to ‘pin’ images and other digital media onto a real-world map. Accessible from anywhere in the world, the resource enables users to explore historical and contemporary visual resources either by location or by ‘collection’. A range of heritage organisations have already partnered with Historypin to help bring their collections to a wider audience and promote new ways of thinking about historical artefacts – particularly those with a social history impact.

The development of the Butler map and a host of other online resources at St John’s College has been made possible thanks to a generous grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, which kick-started the two-year Samuel Butler Project in July 2011. Since then, the College’s vast collection of books, manuscripts, art works, photographs and objects relating to Butler has been comprehensively catalogued, and a number of public events and educational visits have been hosted by the Library.

To find out more, and to explore the fantastic photographs on the Butler map, visit the Samuel Butler Project website.