Up on the 5th floor, the National Library’s imaging unit is a hub of activity. Thousands of scans are made every day – newspaper pages, maps, paintings, and photographs, all being transferred into digital form for the world to see.
“But what exactly do you do up there?” is the question that I am often asked!
The blank expression I was met with recently when trying to explain to a relative what digitisation involves, got me thinking that perhaps it would be worthwhile to describe here the part that the imaging team plays in digitising some of the library’s most treasured collections.
Imaging work in progress
It’s important to note that with every project, the digitisation process begins long before imaging work commences, and involves many stages including a lot of preparation and post-scanning works before the content can be made available online.
But it’s the bit in the middle that remains the challenge for us. For the library’s unique collections, our job is to deliver a ‘digital surrogate’ of every item to be digitised – an accurate representation of the original in digital form. By reproducing material in this way we satisfy both conservation needs, with a digital copy of exactly how the item looked at this moment in time, and access provision by enabling our online users to examine the item as if viewing the original.
The imaging process itself requires a great deal of precision to make this possible; careful setup, measuring, checking and re-checking happens at each stage. If you’ve ever browsed the Digital Mirror you will have no doubt come across one of our quality control patches (usually placed underneath or to the side of an item) and you may have wondered what it’s for. Including one of these targets in each image enables us to monitor exact details in the image and describes the conditions under which an item has been scanned, as well as providing information about the original.
Each collection brings its own specific challenges for digitisation and often brings about some interesting questions. How do we best show the relief detail on a medieval seal whilst maintaining the integrity of the item’s shape and colour? How do we ensure consistency when digitising photographic negatives of varying formats, on different scanners? A recent project to digitise maps called us to question exactly how large a map needs to be before it will not fit under our largest scanner (and believe me, there are some large maps in the collections!)
Working with such vast quantities of material with so many variants necessitates continual innovation in the approaches we take, and by embracing the changes that advances in technology bring, the processes we use can continue to develop and improve. I am certainly interested to see what direction these developments will take in the coming years, and what this will mean for the future of digitisation at the National Library.
Julia Thomas