Meet the librarian: the missing member of the online team?

We've recently been opening up our archives on WalesOnline, well pictures-wise anyway and our stats have revealed something - our readers really, really, really like looking at old photos. It doesn't matter what they are of, places, people or events - the appetite for the past in the digital age is well and truly alive.

You only have to look at the success of websites such as Ancestry or the release of the Victorian crime files to see people have an insatiable hunger for consuming things from the past. With this in mind it wasn't a surprise to see how well a rather simple idea did. In the South Wales Echo we did a 'Cardiff then & now' spread based on photos of Cardiff from yesteryear, with new photos of how the places look now. Simple. But incredibly successful.

This got me thinking, why weren't we calling on our chief librarian more? We're blessed with archives going back a hell of a long way in history - so anything we're doing we should look to include the archive team in our discussions and see if there's anything they can do.

This spawned the through the years of Charlotte Church gallery as her birthday approached, a look-back at Welsh footballing wizard Ryan Giggs' career and shortly a whole host of archive St David's Day celebrations.

So, should the archive/library team be honoury members of the online team? I think so. We could be doing regular 'From the archives' galleries and articles, get them blogging about key events in local history and much more.

Blow the dust off, fire up the archive search and see what you can discover amongst your library team. The most under-used resource in multimedia journalism?

What great examples have you seen of media organisations using their archives? Do you work in the library and wish you could do more with the website? Let me know your views in the comments below