National Archives Image Library
The National Archives Image Library is the image licensing service of The National Archives, the United Kingdom government's official archive, based at Kew in south-west London. It supplies and licenses copies of the nation's records, documents, posters, maps, advertisements, manuscripts and photographs, to publishers, broadcasters, exhibition makers and other media for publication, broadcast, online and commercial use. The archive behind it contains a thousand years of history, from the Domesday Book to the present day, and the Image Library is the route by which that record reaches the printed page and the screen. Where most picture libraries license photographs, this one licenses history itself: the actual documents in which events were recorded by the state at the time.
The institution behind the library
The National Archives was created in 2003 by combining the Public Record Office and the Historical Manuscripts Commission, and in 2006 it merged with the Office of Public Sector Information, which incorporated the former Her Majesty's Stationery Office. Its roots are much older. The Public Record Office had been established under an Act of 1838 to keep the public records safely, operating from Chancery Lane in London before consolidating at Kew in 1996. The Kew building, opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 1977 as an additional home for the records, remains the archive's base, in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames. The institution is a non-ministerial government department and also publishes United Kingdom legislation and official publications, and acts as a leading advocate for the wider archive sector.
A thousand years of records
The holdings from which the Image Library supplies copies span the whole documented history of the English and later British state. They include the Domesday Book of 1086, documents of the central courts of law from the twelfth century onwards, including the Court of King's Bench, the Court of Common Pleas, the Court of Chancery and the Court of Exchequer, and medieval, early modern and modern records of central government. Cabinet papers and Home Office records sit alongside Foreign Office and Colonial Office correspondence, the service and operational records of the armed forces from the War Office and Admiralty and other departments, Board of Trade statistics, and records used by family historians such as wills, naturalisation certificates and criminal records. The material exists in formats from parchment and paper scrolls to digital files and archived websites.
Maps, plans and visual records
Although the archive is famous for text, its visual holdings are extensive, and they are the Image Library's stock in trade. The collections include a large and disparate body of maps, plans and architectural drawings, government posters and public information artwork, advertisements, designs and photographs embedded in departmental files. Wartime propaganda, official photography and publicity material created by ministries all survive within the records, as do the records of the former British Transport Commission and British Railways Board, including railway material transferred from the British Railways Record Office. For picture researchers, this means the library can often supply not the modern photograph of an event, but the contemporary artefact: the poster that was actually pasted up, the map that was actually drawn, or the form on which a famous life was actually recorded.
What the Image Library does
The Image Library's core function is permission and supply. Under The National Archives' published guidance, anyone wishing to reproduce copies of its records for publication, on the internet, for broadcasting, for exhibition or for any commercial purpose must obtain permission from the Image Library, whether the record concerned is protected by Crown copyright, is in non-Crown copyright, or is out of copyright. The library assesses the proposed use, identifies the correct rights position, arranges for copies to be made where necessary and licenses the reproduction. It has historically operated from Kew with a dedicated contact point for publishers and producers, and its permissions framework is the standard route used by the British media when archive documents appear in books, newspapers, programmes and exhibitions.
Crown copyright and private use
The rules the library administers draw a clear line between study and publication. Copies of Crown copyright records may be reproduced freely for private study, non-commercial research or education, including teaching and examination use. Commercial and public-facing use is different: reproduction of copies of non-Crown copyright records will usually also require the permission of the copyright owner in addition to the Image Library's permission, and works identified as belonging to third parties may only be reproduced with that owner's consent. People copying published or unpublished works for private study in the archive's reading rooms do so under a signed statutory declaration, confirming that the copy is for non-commercial research and will not be passed on. This structure explains why the Image Library matters to journalists and publishers: it is the point at which the legal right to show the public a historic document is confirmed.
Treasures of the collection
The range of famous documents available through the library illustrates its appeal to the media. Among the treasures highlighted from the image collections are the will of William Shakespeare, the death certificate of Oscar Wilde, an indictment of the highwayman Dick Turpin, posters produced for the Empire Marketing Board, Victorian textile designs by Christopher Dresser and wallpaper designs by William Cooper Boyle. Railway poster art held in the records, such as the London and North Eastern Railway's 1938 Coronation poster and Southern Railway posters of the 1930s promoting Southampton Docks and travel to Scotland and the Lake District, shows how government and public industry files preserve some of Britain's best-loved commercial art. Material of this kind is licensed constantly for book covers, magazine features, television documentaries and museum displays.
Subjects covered for publishers and broadcasters
The thematic breadth of the records makes the library a first call for factual media across an unusual range of subjects. Major events and topics documented in the files include slavery and its abolition, Irish emancipation, both world wars, mining and political movements, alongside the everyday administration of the state. Alongside the major themes sit more unexpected survivals, from outlandish historic advertisements to Christmas cracker box designs, which give feature writers and programme makers the colour that official history often lacks. The archive also publishes popular image-led books under its own imprint, with titles on subjects such as suffragettes, the Cold War, prime ministers of the twentieth century and the buildings of London, demonstrating the same material in published form.
Distribution through partner libraries
Not every user deals with Kew directly. The National Archives' image collections have also been promoted and supplied through established commercial picture libraries acting as partners; the Mary Evans Picture Library, for example, has featured the National Archives collection to its publishing and media customers, providing search and quotation services for the material. Such partnerships place archive documents inside the workflows picture editors already use, so that a document from Kew can be found, cleared and delivered alongside conventional photography. For a public institution, that combination of a direct permissions service and trade distribution is how its images achieve wide circulation in commercial media while the underlying rights controls remain in place.
How the media uses the service
For news and documentary media, the Image Library serves a different purpose from a photographic agency. A newspaper marking the anniversary of a battle, a broadcaster reconstructing a political scandal, or a publisher illustrating a biography will often want the primary document itself: the service record, the cabinet minute, the court indictment, the map annexed to a report. Showing the document on screen or on the page is an act of evidence, not merely illustration, and it depends on the archive's copies and permissions. The library therefore sits quietly behind a large amount of British historical journalism and publishing, and its credit lines and acknowledgements appear wherever records from Kew are reproduced commercially.
Place among UK picture sources
The National Archives Image Library is best understood as the commercial gateway to the state's own memory. Other entries in Britain's picture industry license the work of photographers or the collections of museums; this one licenses the records of government itself, gathered over a millennium and preserved by law. Its combination of legal authority over Crown copyright material, conservation-grade copies of fragile originals, and subject coverage that runs from medieval courts to modern cabinet government gives it a unique position. As publishing and broadcasting have moved online, the need it meets has grown rather than shrunk: digital media use more archive imagery, not less, and every commercial use of a Kew document still begins with the Image Library.
