Lawrence Levy Photographic Golf Collection Project begins!

The Lawrence Levy Photographic Golf Collection project is underway.  This is a 4-year project, privately funded by the generous support of the Joseph Levy Foundation. The St Andrews University Library, Department of Special Collections was chosen as custodians of the Lawrence Levy Photographic Golf Collection because of its unique positioning as a holder of extensive golf photography collections covering the development of the history of golf from the 19^th century onwards and the fact that it is situated in St Andrews, the Home of Golf.

The Levy collection consists of over 200,000 golf images taken by the famous golf photographer Lawrence Levy between the years 1978 and 1994 covering all of the major golf tournaments and events as well as the golfers, celebrities and spectators of the time.  The project’s goal is to digitise, catalogue and preserve the entire collection and make it available as a valuable online resource for use by researchers, historians, golf enthusiasts, and the media.

It is planned to make selected images available via an on-line soft-launch to varied stakeholders in early 2013 followed by a proposed photo exhibition to coincide with the University of St Andrews 600^th Anniversary Golf Tournament in June 2013. Please note that the Lawrence Levy Photographic Golf Collection will remain closed to the public until its initial public exhibition in June of 2013. After this initial exhibition the collection will undergo a phased unveiling as the collection is progressively digitised, catalogued and featured online.

The enthusiastic project team have already been assembled consisting of Dr Anthony Parker, Curator, and Edward Martin and Dr Lindsey Gray, Digitisation Officers.  Watch this space for further updates and news.

–Anthony Parker

Curator, Lawrence Levy Photographic Golf Collection