George Bernard Shaw photos placed in digital archive

Thousands of photographs taken by playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw are to be published online.

A collaboration between the National Trust and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) has catalogued and digitised the pictures, which are from a largely unseen collection, and will begin to upload them into an online archive.

Shaw was a keen photographer and collected around 20,000 photographic objects, including prints, negatives and albums, during his life. Around 70 per cent of the photos in the collection were taken by the playwright himself.

Other writers are captured in some of the pictures taken by Shaw, with the collection including images of Peter Pan creator J.M. Barrie, iconic science fiction writer H.G. Wells and dramatist Harley Granville Barker.

Sue Donnell, head of archives at the LSE, commented: 'Previously we had to wade through piles of unsorted photographs to view these gems - this project harnesses digital technology to bring an amazing collection of images to a wider audience.'

In May, the British Library announced plans to digitise the newspapers held in its archive, which will involve converting up to 40 million pages into an electronic format.