This paper considers the confluence between the emergence of local studies libraries, collecting photographs, and the adoption of open access public libraries in the UK. It argues that it is no coincidence that these three strands are interconnected because all are concerned with the expansion and democratisation of both the production and consumption of local historical knowledge. While at one level instruments of the liberal state, libraries also offered the tools for autodidactisism and were committed to mass education, as an increasingly large section of the population had to produce as citizens within a democratic society. Access to a sense of the historical past was part of this. I consider the role of photographs in the development of the concept of “local history” for all in public libraries, and how the intellectual and material practices of the library “performed” this sense of history within the new concept of the open access library.