Aims and objectives
The Nigerian Railway Corporation (NRC) began its operations in 1898 and has since produced three major archives: the Mechanical Engineering, Civil Engineering and Personnel Department Archives. Held in the railway compound in Ebute-Metta, Lagos, these archives speak to both Nigeria’s history and its future development trajectory as well as the more global histories of colonialism, technology and engineering. The archives were in a fragile state as the site itself is subject to considerable construction activity. The aim of EAP1418 was to survey the state and contents of Nigerian Railway Corporation archives and to clean, sort, rearrange, catalogue and digitise a sample selection. The project was a collaboration between academics, the heritage NGO Legacy 1995 and Nigeria Railways Corporation, with all as active participants.
Outcomes
EAP1418 exceeded its proposed estimation to digitise 3,000-3,500 images. A survey was conducted in the Mechanical Drawing and the Civil Engineering archives. The sample selected for digitisation dated from 1898 to 1970. In total, 4,816 endangered material, ranging from photographs, map and plans to handbooks and reports were digitised, and their corresponding metadata files were recorded.
The digitised sample includes civil and mechanical engineering-related material (including site maps, engineering structures, processes and operations), drawings of locomotives and rolling stock, and personnel files pertaining to general administration and personnel.
The material itself is still housed at the headquarters of the Nigerian Railway Corporation at Ebute Metta, Lagos. The civil engineering archives have two rooms, comprising the main archive and the drawing room. The main storage is about 12.93 by 9.42 metres large while the drawing room, which houses some of the building plans and technical drawings of the civil engineering department, is slightly larger. The material housed in the mechanical engineering archives concerns the designs of trains and their parts, the technological exchanges between the NRC and other countries as well as other important components of the mechanical department (such as cranes, etc).
Another important contribution of EAP1418 was the professional development of local staff and institutions. Twelve staff from the Nigerian Railway Corporation and four members of the Lagos Studies Association benefited from the training. One volunteer had been so enthused with the skillset she acquired from this programme that she applied through her head of department to digitise their own files. The Legacy 1995 volunteers have since used their new skills and equipment to digitise other historic material in Nigeria and to advise other EAP digitisation projects.
Follow EAP1418 on Twitter and read the media coverage of EAP1418 here and here.
The records copied by this project have been catalogued as:
- Nigerian Railway Corporation Archive (1890-1950)
Due to the cyber-attack on the British Library in October 2023, the archives and manuscripts database is currently inaccessible and we are unable to provide links to the catalogue records for this project.
