Finding photographs of Cessnock LGA
Old photographs of the Cessnock Local Government Area (LGA) are held in many library, archive, museum, academic and community collections. While it may seem that many images are available online, it is important to remember that these digitised images are only a tiny part of any organisation’s collection.
No organisation’s photograph collection is entirely digitised. For this reason, after doing online photograph research, the next step is to contact the various organisations to arrange access to their non-digitised photographs. This is particularly true for many community historical societies, where it is rare to have any digitised collections, so access to their collections is usually always in person.
Google
A simple Google image search for ‘old photos of [fill in place name]’ often yields good results and also gives the ability to trace back to the original source.
Cessnock City Library
Cessnock City Library has almost 2,500 photographs accessible online from the Library’s Local Studies collection on our website: Choose ‘Local History’, then ‘Local History Photographs’.
Trove: National Library of Australia
Trove, created by the National Library of Australia, is the best one-stop shop for information relating to Australia. It brings together in one place the photograph collections of Australian libraries, universities, museums, galleries and archives. Trove is divided into categories, for photographs use ‘Images, maps and artefacts’.
Museums of History NSW
NSW State Archives and Records has amalgamated with Sydney Living Museums to become Museums of History NSW. Both of these organisations have extensive photograph collections, including images of the Cessnock LGA.
Newcastle Region Library
The Newcastle Region Library holds many images of the Cessnock LGA available in their online photograph collection Hunter Photobank.
State Library of NSW
www.sl.nsw.gov.au
Only a small percentage of the State Library of NSW photograph collection is online. Contact the Library directly with your photograph enquiry. Their Small Pictures Collection contains a large number of photographs of regional areas. Contact the Library directly to access this and other non-digitised collections.
Flickr
The photograph-sharing website Flickr is a popular way to share images online. Use of the images vary, check the conditions imposed by the photographer. There are many photographs of the Cessnock LGA on this site.
Picture Maitland
Picture Maitland is Maitland City Library’s online photograph collection. As an adjoining Local Government Area to Cessnock there are many images in their collection of the Cessnock LGA.
University of Newcastle
The Hunter Living Histories collection, University of Newcastle, holds many images of the Cessnock LGA.
Photo time tunnel
Photo time tunnel is photograph business selling historic Hunter Valley photos, you will find photographs of the Cessnock LGA in their collection.
Australian War Memorial
The Australian War Memorial (AWM) has hundreds of thousands of photographs online. Many are out of copyright and in the public domain. The AWM will usually allow a low-resolution free download of an image from their collection, a higher resolution photograph involves a fee.
Creative Commons
Over 500 million images are available to use copyright free on this site.
Copyright
To use photographs it is essential to understand copyright. The best source of copyright information is the Australian Copyright Council.
They have excellent information sheets, recommended are: ‘Copying photographs you have paid for’ and ‘Photographers and copyright’.