National Library of Australia


Australian Stills Digitisation Project

Project participants: ScreenSound Australia
Contact officer/s: Sue Terry, Manager, Documentation Development (email sue_terry@screensound.gov.au, phone 02 6248 2180 or fax 02 6248 2165)
Project description: The project commenced in 1997 and resulted in the digitisation, at screen resolution, of 5,700 stills (photographic prints) from the collection relating to all areas covered by the collection: film, television, radio, and recorded sound productions and related personalities. Some 5,300 of these stills were attached to their database records and made available through the online catalogue on the ScreenSound website in June 1999. The project was developed as a pilot to test issues such as the development of appropriate workflows, impact on access, resolution levels, outsourcing versus in-house operation etc. The project was undertaken on-site at ScreenSound headquarters by an external contractor.
URL of site: http://www.screensound.gov.au
URL for project information:
Content: Mostly black and white prints, plus a small percentage of colour prints.
Digitisation policy and priorities: A digitisation policy is currently being developed.
Timetable: Completed Project - April 1997 - June 1999.
Budget and funding: Full costs have not been calculated. The outsource cost component was approximately $8,000. An unpaid university intern undertook the majority of the physical handling, ie the removal of materials from storage to the contractor and back into storage.
Staff resources: The project was undertaken onsite at ScreenSound by an external provider.
Technical standards: Digitised material consists of photographs.
Images have been scanned as JPEG files at a resolution of 760 x 568 pixels 640x480 pixels (essentially 72dpi) captured through broadcast quality video camera; 8-bit grey scale for black and white images, and 24-bit colour for colour images. Stored on the server, with CD-Rom backup.
Cataloguing and indexing: All items digitised were first 'accessioned' into the organisation's in-house collection management system (MAVIS); the image was then attached to that record. File name used at capture was the unique record number for the item. Data recorded for stills includes title (caption), names associated with the image (though not usually photographer as this is often unknown or unrecorded), date (if known), and simple technical descriptions.
Comments: This was a simple, quick project and few problems were experienced during the digitisation phase. There were a small number of errors - eg incorrect keying of numbers or incorrect coding in the database which created problems at the record matching phase - but these were quickly resolved. The main problems experienced related to clearing copyright as few of the works were in public domain or under the control of ScreenSound. Also, there were significant delays in enhancing the database to accept the images - due primarily to other database work than to problems inherent in the database structure/design itself. During this period - some two years - images were made available on a stand-alone computer in the ScreenSound Library. A second project to digitise c880 lobby cards as medium to high resolution TIFF files (with low resolution JPEG files for web display) is now underway (July 2000).

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.