Digitising the Photographs

Digital technology now allows the National Library of Wales to share its early photographic heritage with Wales and the world. Click on the above thumbnails to navigate through the history of early Welsh photography as seen through the collections of the National Library of Wales.

Digital content is created through the process of digitisation, which produces a digital copy of the original photograph. These photographs were digitised using a digital camera to produce digital archival files suitable for digital preservation, and smaller derivative files for website delivery. Catalogue information, or metadata, was created to describe the photographs, record the digitisation process and maintain the structure of the digital albums. The standard metadata protocols used are METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard), MODS (Metadata Object Description Schema) and the DCMI (Dublin Core Metadata Initiative).

The flexibility of digitisation means that visitors can, for the first time, either browse the photograph albums from cover to cover or view galleries of photographs from each album.

The National Library of Wales intends to include more digital content on this website as more photographic albums are digitised for a worldwide audience.

For more information about digitisation at the National Library of Wales visit: http://www.llgc.org.uk/digitalmirror/