Piloting the Internet - Britain from Above

Enthusiasts viewing photograph albums from the Aerofilms Collection.

The first session of ‘Piloting the Internet-Getting the best form Britain from Above’ ran on Tuesday 20th November at the Royal Commission offices. A small but enthusiastic group gathered to hear about the project from its early origins to what it is now and what we’re hoping to achieve. There were two short presentations detailing the history and potential of the website with plenty of enticing pictures to whet their appetites!

Once the presentations concluded the group was eager to make use of the technology on offer, have a go on the website and conduct their own investigations. One attendee said that he had viewed the Britain from Above site when first launched back in June, he had been impressed with the content but the slowness we had in the first few days had put him off taking a closer look, however, now the website has settled down he says there’s no stopping him, especially since we’ve added more content!  The group were particularly impressed at the number of users and images we had already, but were incredibly excited at the thought of 95,000 images eventually being available online.

Britain from Above on your iPad.

The iPad proved especially popular with it’s easy to use browsing format and large clear images, two of the group using it were rather reluctant to hand it back! Everyone found something of interest, images of Aberaeron and its coastline proved very popular as some of the party have an on-going interest in coastal erosion in that part of the world.

Visitors also made use of the Royal Commission’s archive viewing some of the prints, photograph albums and images of Wales from the Aerofilms Collection, most of which were from outside of the Projects timeline, making a nice addition to the session. Enthusiasts had a keen rifle through pictures from the 1960s and 1970s and enjoyed comparing the online images to the later photograph albums.

All in all it was a compact, successful session that’s left me looking forward to the Penparcau day on the 7th December!


By Natasha Scullion

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