National Library of Australia


Photography and art digitisation

Project participants: Australian War Memorial
Contact officer/s: Neil McPherson, Webmaster (email neil.mcpherson@awm.gov.au, phone 02 6243 4559 or fax: 02 6243 4325)
Project description: Digital conversion of the Australian War Memorial's national collection of photographs of Australians at war to form accessible to the public, researchers, writers and documentarians via the Web. Improved collection management and digital objects that will be sold. Digitisation of photographs, 3-D objects and paintings.
URL of site: http://cas.awm.gov.au
URL for project information:
Content: In Phase one, 160,000 photos, 20,000 artworks. 10% of the collection has already been digitised; 20% is planned to be digitised by the end of 1998 and 30% by the end of 1999.
Digitisation policy and priorities: Digitisation policy formulated by internal working group including department/section heads as part of the organisation's business plan. Online policy under development within public programs.
Timetable: June 1993 - ongoing
Budget and funding: Commonwealth government funding - $A100,000-$A150,000.
Staff resources: Digitisation process undertaken substantially inhouse and outsourced to commercial company.Consideration now being given to training of digitisation staff by staff users, in-house training in the main.
Technical standards: PAL format, predominantly JPEG. Software used: False; Computer: Pentium 486; Capturing equipment: Analogue cams, digital soon; Storage devices: Hard disk.
Cataloguing and indexing: Descriptive captions recorded in the collection management system. Uniform up until now but new equipment will make logging an issue for us.
Comments: Quality (level) of resolution may affect our future actions. Speed of technological change and growth of public expectations.

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

Last modified: August 09 2004.