National Library of Australia
1995 National Preservation Office Conference
Digitisation Projects
at the State Library of New South Wales: An Update
Materials Being Digitised
The following projects are the main priorities for the digitisation of
the Mitchell Library & the Australian Research Collections. However, one
project Conrad Martens Life and Art on CD-ROM was completed in March 1995 and a
prototype CD-ROM of the papers of Sir Joseph Banks was produced in late 1994.
Project 1: Conversion of analogue video disks to digital format
Project 2: Mitchell Library Small Pictures File (SPF)
- Approximately 60,000 images documenting the places and people of
Australia and the SW Pacific with particular emphasis on the places and people
of Sydney and NSW. These images cover the period late 18th Century onwards.
Project 3: Mitchell Library Shipping Collections
- Nicholls collection 1850-1930, 258 vols, Bateson 1800-1970 516 vols,
Bayldon 1057 vols
- A very highly used collection by researchers/genealogists and
shipping experts. Images of sailing, steam and other shipping in Australian
waters.
Project 4: Portraits in the Pictorial Collections
- Oil paintings, watercolours, pencil sketches (possibly photographs)
of famous Australians. 18th Century to date.
Project 5: Pre-1800 maps showing the exploration and discovery of the
Pacific
- Approximately 500 rare and important printed and manuscript maps
drawn from the Mitchell and Dixson collections.
Project 6: Sub-Division Plans
- 30,000 plans created by real estate agents to advertise the sale of
land in Sydney and in NSW towns from the 1860's to the 1930's
- Total number of images scanned to date approx 6000, Conrad Martens
Life Art and Banks Papers on CD-ROM and about 6000 digital images from the "At
Work and Play" Videodisc.
- All scanning has been done off site and has been done incrementally
as projects progress. The emphasis to date has been on the quality of the image
rather than through put and speed of digitisation.
Equipment Used
- Scanning has been done by W & F Pascoe & Discovery Media off
site using a Minolta RP 607/Z Microfilm Reader Printer with a Screen Scan
Nanomach device attached. Early experiments used a 35mm Nikon Coolscan scanner.
This approach was abandoned because each frame had to be jacketed and fed
through manually.
- For the Banks Papers on CD-ROM project a full time archivist is
working on the project and has done so since October 1993.
- This is an unusual project from an archival management viewpoint as
each document is being indexed right down to the item level.
- The Conrad Martens Life and Art CD-ROM provides access to about 300
images by medium, date, or location. Digital images of photographs will be
linked to the bibliographic records on the Library's in-house system.
- The Conrad Martens CD-ROM has been designed purely to view the images
and the programmers have taken considerable care to ensure these images cannot
be easily down loaded and moved around the Internet. In the case of Sir Joseph
Banks manuscript papers no restrictions have been placed on users who may down
load images to disk or print them out.
- Some of these images are already on the Internet at the home page of
Discovery Media.
- Other State Library of NSW images on the Internet are at
The Wellington
Valley Project site[note - by 2005 this site was no longer available]. These related to the letters and journals of the
Church Missionary Society mission at Wellington Valley, NSW in the 1830's and
1840's.
- As digitisation projects progress it is intended that JPEG images
will be made available over the Internet and that archival TIF image files will
be maintained for reproduction and ordering purposes.
- To date TIF files of the Banks Papers have been stored on CD-ROM.
- The high standards of microfilming done by W & F Pascoe have
carried over to the digitisation process and each image is scanned to the
highest quality. Images have been scanned from microfilm (in the case of the
Banks Project) which has been filmed to the level of 160 line pairs per
millimetre and scanned at 100dpi using 256 grey scale. It has been found that
scanning over 100 dpi creates files which are too large and the 10,000 images
will not fit onto on CD-ROM. 100 dpi is a compromise between quality and
access.
- Files are captured in group 4 TIF format and subsequently converted
to lossy JPEG images which take up about 400k each file. The Group 4 TIF files
are being stored on a separate CD-ROM for archival purposes.
- For the Banks Papers on CD-ROM Project this has been one of the most
arduous aspects of the work that has been undertaken. The original order has
been altered many times since 1820 when Sir Joseph Banks died and it has been
necessary to reorder the papers and where necessary disbind bound volumes of
the papers. Preservation of individual documents has also taken place.
- The Conrad Martens project has involved the creation of a large
number of 4 x 5 colour transparencies which have subsequently been scanned.
- Indexing October 1993 - March 1996 ca$A50,000
- Programming Interface/retrieval engine $A20,000 & production of
25 prototype disks @ $A25 per disk
- Production of HTML files in Microsoft $A40,000
- Multimedia Viewer, and linking of image files with index
- Equipment & consumables $A10,000
- Microfilming and Scanning $A10,000
- Trust Fund established under the Sir Joseph Banks Memorial
Act, 1945 ($A80,000) the remainder from SLNSW consolidated revenue.
- Conrad Martens Life and Art $A50,000 grant from the Gordon Darling
Foundation plus approximately $A70,000 "in kind" work completed by Monitor
Information Systems in programming and constructing the product.
Nature of Product
- Windows CD-ROM in the case of the Sir Joseph Banks Papers and hybrid
Macintosh/Windows CD-ROM in the case of Conrad Martens Life and Art.
Cost of Product to the Consumer
- Conrad Martens Life and Art $A159
- Sir Joseph Banks Papers on CD-ROM - undecided at present but
hopefully around $A100.
Return to 1995 NPO Conference
Last updated 27 Feburary 1998