The Telegraph & Argus Stop the Cut petition will today be handed to the Science Museum Group to hit home the vital role the National Media Museum plays in Bradford, as well as nationally and internationally.

More than 45,000 people have signed the petition which was started earlier this month after group director Ian Blatchford warned that Government spending cuts could force it to close one of its three museums in the north.

As well as being a major visitor attraction in the heart of Bradford, the museum houses a world-renowned collection of artefacts of huge historic and cultural significance – from the Cottingley Fairies images to skeletons from Jason and the Argonauts.

What visitors see on display in the museum is just a fraction of the collection, which comprises 3.5 million items.

To mark the museum’s recent 30th anniversary, visitors were invited on behind-the-scenes tours covering ‘30 items in 30 minutes’, taking in highlights of the archives.

Insight tours are held regularly, giving visitors the chance to look around the Collections and Research centre where hundreds of thousands of items are stored.

It is an Aladdin’s cave of treasures not on permanent display, stored in two libraries and a suite of storage rooms, each with its own ‘micro-climate’.

The museum’s extensive national collection is split into photography, film, television and new media, encompassing some of the “finest and most compelling visual material found anywhere in the world”. It includes pivotal firsts – the world’s earliest known surviving negative, the earliest television footage, the camera that made the earliest moving pictures in Britain and the first ever email.

Bradford City of Film director David Wilson said the museum collections are the “crown jewels of photography, film and television”.

“They are world-class examples of human endeavour and ingenuity,” he added. “They hold valuable lessons from the past and inspire future generations. Bradford and indeed the wider region have strong connections to the origins of these fields, both in terms of their scientific development and the cultural impact they have made across the world.”

The Photography Collection – described as the most important in the world – incorporates aesthetic and technical developments, from early experiments to contemporary digital imaging, as well as extensive examples of photographic technology and key images by influential photographers.

The collection comprises the Daily Herald Archive, containing two million photographs from 1930-1969, the Royal Photographic Society Collection, the Kodak Museum Collection, and the Henry Fox Talbot collection, which includes the earliest negative; a ‘latticed window’ image of 1835.

Other world-class items include the Giroux Daguerreotype camera – made in 1839, the year the invention of photography was announced, and the first camera offered for public sale – and the 1888 Kodak, the camera that revolutionised photography, transforming it into a popular medium.

The collection also pays tribute to the world-famous Cottingley Fairies hoax, carried out by ten-year-old Frances Griffiths and her cousin Elsie Wright, 16. The girls started taking photographs of ‘fairies’ at Cottingley Beck in the summer of 1917 – they stuck paper cut-outs onto leaves and developed the pictures in Elsie’s father’s darkroom – and the photographs fooled the world. A camera given to the girls by Arthur Conan Doyle, who published the photographs in his book, The Coming Of Fairies, is part of the museum’s collection, along with the camera used to take the 1917 pictures.

The Cinematography Collection traces the history of cinema, from optical toys and magic lanterns to today’s motion picture and digital technologies.

The collection traces film processes from 1895 to the present, and includes rare objects such as an Edison Kinetophone and material relating to the world’s first colour movie process, Kinemacolor; 18th and 19th century lantern slides and projection equipment, equipment from the Ealing, Elstree and Pinewood studios; drawings from the Hammer Horror studio and a Zeitlupe camera used to record German V-bomb experiments during the Second World War.

Other items include an 1896 Cinematograph Camera, donated by pioneer film producer and inventor Robert W Paul to the Science Museum in 1913, which founded the Cinematography Collection. The camera is mounted on what is probably the first panning head, used by Paul when filming Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee procession in 1897 to swivel the camera to follow the action.

The archive also includes the Ray Harryhausen Collection documenting the film-maker’s work over a 40-year career. The 20-000 or so items include drawings, paintings and storyboards for Harryhausen’s films, along with iconic models such as Pegasus from Clash of the Titans and a mini Raquel Welch from One Million Years BC.

The Television Collection traces the evolution of TV from the late 19th century to the present and boasts an unrivalled collection of objects, not least John Logie Baird's 1925 experimental apparatus.

There’s a range of television sets dating back to 1928, an archive of classic TV commercials, the world’s first practicable video recorder, the Ampex VR1000 1956, and even an ‘Audience Reaction Indicator’ – Hughie Green’s famous Clap-o-meter from Opportunity Knocks.

Completing the museum’s extensive national collection is the New Media Collection, exploring how the digital revolution has transformed the way media is produced, delivered and accessed.

A collection of home computer systems and software traces the rise of the internet, and the devices used to connect to it, while gaming is represented in the National Videogame Archive, a collection of hardware, original software and designs documenting the role of videogames in our cultural life.