A fresh look for the B&NES-owned Bath in Time website with a more commercial feel to help cover the costs of running the service and investing in future archive improvements.
Bath in Time contains a vast collection of more than 40,000 images of Bath and the surrounding areas through time. The online image library includes prints, original artworks, photographs from the earliest days of photography, famous faces, maps, vintage posters, playbills and much more.
Visitors to the new website can choose from a wide range of gifts printed with iconic and beautiful images. Alternatively, customers can select any image to be printed on their own bespoke product – from framed prints to mugs, bags, cushions and tea towels.
Bath in Time is popular with local history researchers, students, academics and family historians, and the website has been improved to offer better search functions. Users can now save images for future reference with the new lightbox option and refine results with the improved search filters.
Councillor Dine Romero, Cabinet Member for Children and Young People, Communities and Culture at Bath & North East Somerset Council, said: “We hope that people will enjoy browsing the new Bath in Time website, whether they’re researching the history of the area or shopping for a unique gift.”
Bath in Time was founded in 2007 by local photographer and history enthusiast Dan Brown to help enhance the awareness, understanding and appreciation of the World Heritage City of Bath and the surrounding areas. The Council took ownership of Bath in Time in 2017.
The image library is mainly based on important collections located at Bath Record Office: Archives and Local Studies and the Bath Preservation Trust, with valuable contributions from several private collections.
It’s my understanding that the redesign will make researching easier and give the authority the capability of selling new bespoke products with the aim being to cover the costs of the development and ongoing hosting and – if possible – to make a small profit to invest in further improvements to the archive. Introducing reproduction fees will help achieve this.
I think the Bath in Time website is a great resource and a credit to its founder, Dan Brown. However am I the only one dismayed by the use of a far more intrusive watermark plastered over all of the images making them pretty much unusable unless purchased? Many of these images are from the public collection, often out of copyright. Shouldn’t there be some free availability for use by residents, researchers and non-profit groups? Compare Bath in Time’s watermarked images with the City of York’s, for example: https://exploreyork.wpengine.com/archives/our-collections/collections-guides
Dear Richard
What you are suggesting regarding the *Bath Time* website appears to be a sound move .
Kind regards Audrey
See also: https://www.flickr.com/photos/127532267@N05/albums