Licensing collections

The London Archives works with a range of partners to licence and publish documents and images through digital platforms and media including books in printed and digital format.

Licensing Partnerships at The London Archives

We welcome licensing enquiries from anyone interested in working with us to share the extraordinary collections in our care through digital or print. Our records a wide range of material of interest to family historians tracing their ancestors in London and academic institutions and historians.

Our image collections include millions of photographs, prints, posters and maps, and feature both well known images of the capital as well as lots of hidden gems waiting to be uncovered.

Licensing Partners

Although there no specific requirements for working with us as a licensing partner, where relevant we would typically expect that anyone working with us to licence and publish items from the collections would have good experience of the following.

• large scale digitisation projects in a heritage setting
• working with historical archive documents
• experience of publishing in the history, family history or academic markets
• managing commercial models that return income streams to licensors

Key Information

The following considerations are relevant to all licensing and publishing projects.

Ownership

We do not own all of the collections at The London Archives. Although we can support the process of identifying and requesting permission from collection owners, this can be a complicated and time consuming process.

Rights

Many of the documents we own contain third party rights, for example a photograph in which the photographer retains rights. Although we can support the process of requesting permission from rights holders.

Digitisation

Our in house digitisation service may be able to work on your project and can provide an estimate of digitisation costs.

Condition

It is necessary for our Collections Care team to carry out condition surveys prior to digitisation and any work required to ensure that the items can be safely digitised, which would be charged.

If you or your company are interested in discussing a licensing partnership with The London Archives, please contact us.