National Library of Australia


Images from the heritage collections

Project participants: State Library of Tasmania; Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (a branch within the same Department as the Library), shared hardware, software and staff resources for the project; Archives Office of Tasmania provider of photographic services to the library; Arts Tasmania. All ran pilot projects for the Department under the Imaging Steering Committee.
Contact officer/s: Tony Marshall, Senior Librarian Heritage Collection (email Tony.Marshall@Central.tased.edu.au, phone 03 6233 7498 or fax 03 6231 0927)
Project description: Pilot project to digitise images from the State Library Heritage Collections, followed by full scale project to continue scanning all images from the Heritage Collections and make them available to users via the Internet. Aim to provide improved public access to the collection.
URL of site: http://catalogue.statelibrary.tas.gov.au/find/?avail=Online&format=Images&sort=title
URL for project information:
Content: Photographs, 3-D objects and paintings.
Digitisation policy and priorities: No digitisation or online policies in place. Approximately 1% of the entire collection is involved in this digitisation project. 10% has already been digitised; 30% is planned to be digitised by the end of 1998 and 60% by the end of 1999.
Timetable: 1 April 1997 - ongoing
Budget and funding: It should be noted that the budget figure quoted covers four institutions over three years. Internal and State government funding: $A250,000-$A500,000.
Staff resources: Work to be done inhouse and in collaboration with others.
Technical standards: 3 images produced from each 35mm slide archival image - 300dpi TIFF large internet image - 72 dpi JPEG, 600 pixels wide thumbnail internet image - 72dpi JPEG, 200 pixels wide. Computer(s): 8500/120 PowerMAC Capturing equipment: Nikon LS1000 slide scanner Storage devices: Hard disk for temporary storage, CD-ROM for permanent storage - HP SuperStore CD-ROM burner.
Cataloguing and indexing: Images are regarded as an integral part of the library catalogue. A MARC 856 tag is added to give the Internet address of images that have one. Cataloguing data is transferred from the library catalogue to the web page containing the image, both as text appearing on the page, and as Dublin Core metadata in the Head section.
Comments: Main problem was deciding on resolution to use for archival image. Started with 600 dpi, but files produced were too large to handle easily, so dropped to 300dpi. Decision to store on CDROM was based on cost.

Archival quality image was the main issue: whether to keep one, what standards to use for this image, how to store it. The lower quality web images were not a problem as the web at the moment will only display images up to a certain quality anyway, so the standards were set by the web itself. The final determination of the standards for the archival image were that it be of sufficiently high quality that the item need not be rescanned within the next five years. The 35mm slide is regarded as the ultimate archival image for preservation. Still to be determined - software, hardware migration path for images in future.

Project managers wishing to update the details of their Australian digitisation projects, should email the changes to alg@nla.gov.au.

Last modified: May 26 2008.