| Description | This Series comprise minutes and other records of the revived Survey Council, constituted after a meeting of 20 August 1946 at the headquarters of the BPS at York House, Great Charles Street, Birmingham. Having gone from being a largely separate body to becoming a section of the BPS in 1921, the meeting of 1946 was convened to 'discuss the future management, organisation and work of the WPS' (see MS 2724/1/2/1 below).
Early meetings continued to meet at the headquarters of the BPS until 24 January 1947, by which point a reconstituted Preliminary Survey Committee began to meet at Birmingham Central Reference Library. Meetings were chaired by the City Librarian, who in January 1947 was Mr N.M. Cashmore. Although the records date slightly prior to 1947, they have been catalogued in this record series as they largely cover the period in which the Survey Committee had effectively been subsumed to form part of the general collections functions of the Birmingham Reference Library rather than being a committee of amateur photographers loosely affiliated to the BPS (for more information on the post-Second World War Survey see Administrative History in catalogue record MS 2724).
Although technically Birmingham City Council departmental records of the Public Libraries Department, the records have been catalogued in this Series as they cover the period prior to the Survey Committee's proper amalgamation with the Library on 24 January 1947, and because they contain useful contextual information about the provenance and deposit of the photographs collected from around the year 1942. The photographs that make up this Post-War Series of WPS prints are catalogued as Sub Collection MS 2724/3 below.
The administrative records themselves comprise seven books originally stored in a box file and given an old library reference number IIR 89 (662354). The contents (now numbered MS 2724/1/2/1 - 6 below) include minutes of the Warwickshire Photographic Survey Committee and Executive Committee (MS 2724/1/1 - 2). The file also includes two items which have been closed under the terms of the Data Protection Act, 1998, as the personal contact details of committee members and photographers and other organisations who deposited photographic prints at the old Reference Library. |