US Navy Photography Now Accessible

Around 2,000 oblique aerial photographs of the coastline around Scotland and Cumbria, taken by the United States Navy in the 1960s, are now accessible online thanks to an archivist on secondment from The US National Archives and Records Administration. Tom McAnear spent a month working in NCAP on an internship programme sponsored by the US Government.

The US Navy aerial photographs were taken to aid amphibious landing training, and show the port of Leith undergoing reclamation and expansion; the entire coastline of the North-East highlands from Duncansby Head to Inverness; and the shoreline of the Solway Firth from Whithorn to Barrow-in-Furness.

Tom, who is more accustomed to working with textual records in the US National Archives in Washington D.C., was trained by NCAP staff in a range of aerial photograph handling, preservation, digitisation and cataloguing techniques.