A unique file relating to the planning of the 1951 Festival of Britain is now accessible online for the very first time.

The file comprises almost three hundred pages of documentation that offer unprecedented insight into the planning of the Homes and Gardens Pavilion, and is one of 77 files held in the Design Council Archive at University of Brighton relating to this national event. A key resource for researchers, this rich set of correspondence, memoranda, plans, and sketches is now visible to scholars around the world.

Handwritten note from the official administrative file relating to the Homes and Gardens Pavilion at the Festival of Britain, 1951. Design Council Archive, University of Brighton.

Front cover from ’4 Ways of Living’ leaflet, from the official administrative file relating to the Homes and Gardens Pavilion at the Festival of Britain, 1951. Design Council Archive, University of Brighton.

Photograph of Homes and Gardens Pavilion designed by Bronek Katz and Reginald Vaughan at the Festival of Britain, 1951. Sculpture by Jacob Epstein in the foreground.
Design Council Archive, University of Brighton.

The digitisation work was undertaken as part of the JISC-funded Look-Here! project during 2010 in anticipation of the 60th anniversary of the Festival of Britain this year. The file can be accessed via the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) and compliments the 3200 images already available online from the Design Archives at University of Brighton. For more information, and to view all of the digitised collections from the archive, see:
http://www.vads.ac.uk/collections/DCA

The file can also be accessed as part of the multi-level description of the Design Council Archive available on the Archives Hub

The Look-Here! project, which was led by VADS in collaboration with nine partners across the arts education sector, sought to develop skills and strategies for digitisation within libraries, museums, and archives in the arts education community. One of the outputs of the project was a series of digitisation case studies by project partners, including a case study on the digitisation of the Festival of Britain documentation, which can be found on the project website at: http://www.vads.ac.uk/lookhere/casestudies

The Visual Arts Data Service (VADS), a research centre at the University for the Creative Arts (UCA), has been awarded funding by JISC for an innovative project which brings together UCA and the University of Surrey in a new collaboration focusing on visual plagiarism.

The Spot the Difference project will pilot the use of visual search tools developed by the Centre for Vision, Speech, and Signal Processing (CVSSP) at the University of Surrey and test their application to learning and teaching in the arts and in particular to the complex and nebulous concept of ‘visual plagiarism’.

Whilst there has been extensive research and guidance in the area of text-based plagiarism, there has been relatively little research undertaken in the area of visual plagiarism. The Spot the Difference project seeks to address this gap, and in particular to explore the potential application and relevance that visual search technology may have to offer in this area.

The Centre for Vision, Speech, and Signal Processing at the University of Surrey is the largest UK academic research centre exploring topics in image and video analysis, with 110 researchers and ranked 2nd on the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). The Centre has pioneered visual search technologies utilising the ‘bag of visual words’ framework which will be used in the demonstrator for the Spot the Difference project.

The project is funded through a JISC Learning & Teaching Innovation Grant and will run for 12 months from June 2011 to May 2012.

Two of the Royal College of Art’s most important collections have been made available to the general public through a new digitisation project which is accessible through the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS).

Gazebo II, design by Thomas Heatherwick, 1994, Royal College of Art Record of Student Work

The Record of Student Work is a rare collection, containing over 30,000 slides of student work, which dates back to the 1960s and includes early work by notable College alumni including David Hockney, Tracey Emin, Ridley Scott and Thomas Heatherwick. A comprehensive and unique resource, it provides insight into the early creative processes of some of Britain’s best-known artists and designers, usually captured as they complete their postgraduate studies with installation shots from students’ degree shows.

The nature of the collection – comprised mainly of 35mm slides and usually locked in filing cabinets in the RCA library – has meant that many of these images have never been published. Now however, a three-year scanning project has resulted in over 5,000 of the most notable images from the collection being made publicly available for the first time when the online resource goes live on May 5, 2011.

Womenswear by Philip Treacy, 1990, Royal College of Art Record of Student Work

The earliest slides (1960-1978) represent ad hoc attempts by individual departments to record their students’ work. Fashion and Textiles are especially well represented with images of the work of Ossie Clark and Zandra Rhodes among many others. However, from 1979, at the instigation of Christopher Frayling, then Professor of General Studies, Jan Murton, slide curator, and photographer Barry Marsden, the Royal College of Art degree show was comprehensively photographed and catalogued across all departments for the first time. The approach continues to this day, although slides were replaced with digital photography in 2003.

Notable alumni whose work is represented in this selection include: David Hockney, Zandra Rhodes, Chris Ofili, Tracey Emin, Julien Macdonald, Philip Treacy, Orla Kiely, Harold Offeh and Thomas Heatherwick. These images are a representative sample of the entire collection 1960-2002 and all have been scanned from the original 35mm slides. Senior tutors from each department worked with the Special Collections Manager to identify key students’ work. Once a student was selected, every available slide of their work was digitised to provide a comprehensive picture of their work.

A Rake’s Progress (8A; Bedlam) by David Hockney, Royal College of Art Collection

In addition to the Record of Student Work, over a thousand works from the Royal College of Art Collection of Paintings have been digitised and are also being made available through VADS. The Royal College of Art Collection is an invaluable resource of works that represent significant developments in British painting from the middle years of the 20th century to the present. The collection is made up of works donated by Painting graduates and staff. Examples include works by: Edward Bawden, Eric Ravilious, Paul Nash, John Piper, Frank Auerbach, John Minton, Peter Blake, David Hockney, Chris Ofili, Tracey Emin, Dinos Chapman and Sophie von Hellermann.

Sunset over the Malverns by Paul Nash, 1944, Royal College of Art Collection © Tate, London 2006

Dr Paul Thompson, Rector of the Royal College of Art said: “These are indeed remarkable resources. Those selected from the Record of Student Work have been chosen not only for their subsequent eminence and reputation, but also for embodying particular trends, or producing especially idiosyncratic or revealing work. In both collections, the works have considerable research value and represent over half a century of work here at the RCA”

Neil Parkinson, Special Collections Manager added: “The College believes in making the images available as widely as possible on a non-commercial basis for the purposes of learning, teaching and research. The Visual Arts Data Service (VADS), which collates images from the HE sector for educational use, shares this aim, which makes them a natural partner for delivery of our image collections to the widest possible audience.”

View the collections online at:

Royal College of Art Collection

Royal College of Art Record of Student Work