| 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). |
Last modified: August 09 2004.