The Archive Collections

Introduction

This archive provides free online access to historical collections relating to British caving, held or curated by the British Cave Research Association. The material spans much of the twentieth century and includes photograph albums, organisational records, personal collections, and specialist publications — documenting both the development of caving as a sport and its associated disciplines, including cave exploration, cave diving and cave rescue. The archive currently contains 13 collections, 274 documents, and 46,242 images.

There are also other outstanding online archives dedicated to various aspects of British caving and cavers (See the British Caving Library Registry of Caving Collections). These pages provide a home for BCRA-specific collections, and for other collections that merit general access.

If you have suitable material for inclusion, please contact the British Caving Library librarian.

Using this archive

The archive is organised into three levels: Collections → Documents → Items.

1. Start by selecting a collection below.
2. Within each collection, choose a document to view its contents
3. Select an item in the document to view its high resolution image.
4. A breadcrumb trail at the top right of each page shows where you are and lets you move back through the levels.
5. Larger collections also include dropdown or hierarchical menus for jumping directly to specific items.

The iitem images can be viewed at three resolutions.

• The lowest shows the full image within the viewing area.
• The medium resolution fills the screen width and may require vertical scrolling.
• The highest displays the full-resolution image, allowing detailed zooming and panning.

On mobile devices, these options are hidden, as images can be zoomed and panned directly using touch gestures.

Copyright and use

Copyright in all material is held either by the original creators or by the BCRA. You are welcome to browse freely, but please contact us before reproducing or reusing any text or images.

Technical notes

This site relies on JavaScript being available. To prevent web scraping, a few limitations apply to this site. Direct linking to images is protected by a simple CAPTCHA, and links to pages within the archive cannot be opened via the right-click menu, although they can be opened using Ctrl + left-click. The main images cannot be viewed in a separate tab from the Ctrl + right-click menu, but they can be downloaded. The filename of the downloaded image identifies the originating archive, collection, document, and image each separated by the '-' character (for example: "BCRAOnlineArchive-binns-bsa-RF386.JPG").

Collections

The following collections are available, listed in alphabetical order: