Forty thousand prints, findable at last

The Northern Print Archive holds over forty thousand items — trade posters, ledgers, type specimens, safety notices — from a century of Northern commercial printing. Almost none of it was findable. The collection database was a spreadsheet, the public site showed forty scanned highlights, and a two-person curatorial team fielded research requests by email. Digitisation funding had been secured; a way to actually publish the work had not.

We designed the archive as a catalogue, not a gallery. Every item gets a numbered record with consistent fields — printer, method, date, dimensions, provenance — and the browsing model works the way researchers think: by decade, by printer, by method, by subject. The interface borrows its structure from the archive's own specimen cards, set in a type palette drawn from the collection's grotesques.

Digitisation is ongoing, so the system was designed for incompleteness. Records publish the day they're catalogued, un-photographed items appear as typed records rather than broken images, and the homepage counts the collection honestly: catalogued, photographed, remaining.

The archive launched with 8,000 records and now publishes roughly 600 a month. Research requests by email fell as self-service retrieval took over, and the archive's specimen records began appearing in university reading lists — the citation traffic the curators had wanted for a decade.