YP Letters: North left out of the picture with break-up of archive

Regarding Sarah Freeman’s “North Left out of Picture” about splitting up the photographic collections in Bradford (The Yorkshire Post, February 3).

It is clear many museums are financially stretched and will increasingly be so. The outcry about the potential closure of the National Media Museum in 2013 explains why the press release about the transfer was issued as a fait accompli last weekend.

The National Media Museum seems likely to become much more of a northern outpost of the Science Museum. Clearly it wants to cut costs and offloading some of the collection is part of this. The loser is the photographic collection, the strength of which was its scale, content and diversity.

The future of some of the rest of the photographic collections are uncertain. For the time being access will be very limited. It will not improve access or research if the collection is dispersed. Nor will it be any cheaper in London to carry out the work involved to increase access. Who will be deciding what goes where? Many of the curators who could have added input have gone, even if it would not have been their choice to split the collection. We need to ensure in the land of William Henry Fox Talbot, the British inventor of the essence of photography, that we do better for our photographic collections.