Inspire Picture Archive

Inspire: Culture, Learning and Libraries is a charitable community benefit society that delivers a culture and learning services across Nottinghamshire.

The Inspire team wanted a new digital platform to showcase their huge digital archive. With photographs and manuscripts that date back to the 12th Century, their fantastic archive captures the heritage of the county of Nottinghamshire.

Key drivers for the new platform were:

• Ability to drive social interaction online
• Commercial exploitation of images
• Cloud hosting
• Interactive social features, with intuitive features
• Easy to use back-end

Launched in 2017, Inspire Picture Archive (IPA) holds over 40,000 archive images of Nottinghamshire and the surrounding area. It’s a real treasure trove that documents the county’s past and present, and includes the world-famous Raleigh archive.

IPA is not your normal Corals platform. Working with the Inspire team, we’ve developed a feature that enables users to upload their own photos. This is a fantastic way to engage local audiences and to grow the IPA archive.

We have particularly loved how the Inspire team have embraced the use of the homepage tiles feature. These curated collections regularly change, and cover a range of both playful and serious topics, such as bygone beards, Sherwood Forest and black history.