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.

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