National Library of Australia


The Digital Scriptorium

Project participants: University of Newcastle Archives - Rare Books & Special Collections Unit
Contact officer/s: Mr Gionni Di Gravio (phone 02 4921 5819, fax 02 49215833 or email gionni.digravio@newcastle.edu.au)
Project description: The Project is aimed at providing an access point for all our scanned and digitised materials from our archives, manuscript and rare book collections.We also attempt to provide researchers with the materials in Cdrom format. We would aim to try and integrate these into a database management system in due course.
URL of site: http://www.newcastle.edu.au/services/library/collections/archives/int/digitalscriptorium.html
URL for project information: http://www.newcastle.edu.au/services/library/collections/archives/int/digitalscriptorium.html
Content: At present the digitised materials cover a range of rare books, multimedia productions, archive manuscripts, documents such as correspondence and photographic collections. Photographs, sound recordings, handwritten material, typewritten text and other print materials digitised.
Digitisation policy and priorities: No digitisation policy.
Timetable: Released 4 August 2000 as an on-going project based upon past digitisation work that had been archived. Further titles will be added in the course of time - no fixed timetable.
Budget and funding:
Staff resources: Inhouse.
Technical standards: Hardware:Canon Powershot Digital Camera, Umax Powerlook III Scanner, HP Scanjet Scanner. Software: MagicScan 4.3, Paperport, Photoshop Scanning res: 200dpi - 300dpi. Original scans: tif format archived on cdrom, jpgs used for web .
Cataloguing and indexing: Some metadata is used to describe the materials, we use no online database at the moment.
Comments: Difficulties in obtaining clear readable images with the digital camera, overcome with trial and error with lighting adjustments.

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.