CILIP Sussex held an afternoon school, re-creating the past - digitising your collection and dealing with metadata; being of the leisured classes I thought I would attend. The absence of a wifi network made live tweeting impossible, but perhaps a retrospective blog post will do, and I have left it so long that Jill Duffin beat me to it: http://communities.cilip.org.uk/blogs/informationadvice/archive/2010/10/12/digitising-stuff.aspx. So I'll add a little here.
Martin Hayes, West Sussex Local Studies Library, spoke first, acknowledging he was no expert on the technical aspects of digitisation. Nevertheless, West Sussex had run a number of digitisation projects in the past six years, all Lottery funded:
- West Sussex Past Pictures
- Victorian West Sussex
- West Sussex Seaside Holidays
- The Walter Gardiner Photography Collection (part of West Sussex Past Pictures), more than 100,000 images from the1880s to the 1980s. A six week exhibition of pictures from the collection had just ended.
- Crawley Digital Heritage project (based on the Roger Bastable collection of c. 10,000 originals), the best being online on Flickr in Crawley library's photostream
- Edwardian Crawley, shown on a nine-screen video wall at the new library in Crawley, and local groups are also digitising material to be displayed on the screens.
- The Young Ones: education and childhood on the West Sussex coast, with five partner schools
Some of their collection can also be seen in the West Sussex Libraries Local Studies' photostream on Flickr.
Martin told us how local residents came forward with material to be digitised for the collections, and of collaborations with local businesses. Some of the uses made of digitised material may be unpredictable. Digitising has had some considerable advantages, especially for the preservation of delicate or rare materials. POstcard collectors seem to be a dishonest bunch, and prone to theft. West Sussex has archived all this on a shoestring: the budget for each library for digitising is around £1,000, and it only cost £8-9,000 to set up the in-house digitisation unit, based at Worthing, though for Crawley they set up a mobile unit, consisting of a laptop loaded with Photoshop Elements and a scanner. In the unit they have flatbed and overhead scanners, and a tripod camera. Martin mentioned robotic scanners. His experiences of microfilm scanners has not been good. To scan, they group like items together, use meaningful filenames, and de-screen printed images. Resolutions used vary from 300 dpi for 10" x 8" prints to 4000 dpi for 35 mm transparencies, They have made heavy use of the advice services offered by JISC Digital Media. Print materials digitised included newspapers, directories and sale catalogues. They save images as tiffs or RAW files, not jpegs. They use Silverfast as well, and find Photoshop useful for batch conversion.
Elaine Sheppard, of Screen Archive South East, one of the twelve regional film archives, after outlining what metadata is, told us about their choices of metadata for the archive. There are at least five different standards for moving image metadata, and in 2005 Screen Archive South East decided to develop their own schema, which, after some debate, is now being taken up by the other regional archives
