In February, Magnum Photos announced it sold its US collection of 185,000 press prints to a private investment firm, owned by Dell Inc's founder. The archives, representing 60 years of history, were transferred to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas to be preserved, catalogued and made accessible for the next five years.

Michael Dell, who founded the personal computer company that bears his name, attended the University of Texas in the early 1980s, and has in the past donated more than $50m to the institution. His private investment firm, MSD Capital, acquired the Magnum Photos' New York archives dating from as far back as the 1930s.

The archives contains images shot by Magnum photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Elliott Erwitt, Leonard Freed, Bruce Davidson, Rene Burri, Eve Arnold, Dennis Stock and more than 80 others, the agency says. It contains 'images of icons from Picasso to Marilyn Monroe, from Sinatra to Gandhi, and from Castro to a young Queen Elizabeth', which coexist in the collection with depictions of international conflicts, political unrest and cultural strife. Capa's famous images from the Spanish Civil War and the D-Day landings are also included in the archives.

The Harry Ransom Center has now announced that the collection is ready for consulttion by researchers, students and members of the public. The Magnum Photos Collection is accessible in the Ransom Center's reading room on weekdays from 9am to 5pm.

The collection's original physical order has been preserved, says the Ransom Center, however, a preliminary inventory that intellectually groups similar types of materials together to aid search, retrieval and access, has been created and is available online at research.hrc.utexas.edu. "These broad groups include photographers, personalities, subjects, geography, and portraits and snapshots of Magnum photographers, staff, contributors and meetings."

"Upon receipt of the collection, one of the Ransom Center's top priorities was to provide access as soon as possible to the materials," says David Coleman, curator of photography at the Ransom Center. "While this preliminary inventory enables that access, our future goal is to provide more detailed information, to list personalities individually and include subcategories for the series relating to subjects and geographical locations."

For more information, visit www.magnumphotos.com and www.hrc.utexas.edu.