National Library of Australia


Wine literature of the world

Project participants: State Library of South Australia
Contact officer/s: Peter Jenkins, Manager Digital Library Group (Jenkins.Peter@slsa.sa.gov.au, phone 08 8207 7315 or fax 08 8207 7351)
Project description: Digitisation an initial 2,000 items from the State Library of South Australia's collection of wine books and ephemera to showcase one of the Library's most extensive and unique collections. Images will become part of the Wine Literature of the World website and also catalogued and accessible through the Library's OPAC.
URL of site:
URL for project information:
Content: The State Library of South Australia holds the largest collection of wine-related material in the southern hemisphere. Material includes books, pamphlets, photographs, magazines, wine labels, hand and typewritten materials, menus and wine lists, 3D objects and South Australian company records.
Digitisation policy and priorities: http://www.slsa.sa.gov.au/library/2020.htm
Timetable: Continuing - since 22 June 1999.
Budget and funding: In-kind sponsorship by EDS Australia estimated at approximately $70,000.
Staff resources: Scanning and image optimisation by EDS Australia sub-contractor and SLSA contract staff; project management and indexing by SLSA staff.
Technical standards: Master digital images: 600 ppi bitonal, 300 ppi 256-level greyscale and 300 ppi 24-bit colour uncompressed TIFF Image capture: IBM PC and Apple Power Macintosh G3 beige, A4 flatbed scanner/Adobe Photoshop with TWAIN plug-in. Indexing: DEC Alpha 300/Innovative Interfaces Inc Innopac.
Cataloguing and indexing: Uses the Library's catalogue system (Innovative Interfaces Inc's Innopac), with digital objects linked to the library catalog through MARC field 856. Some information exported from the catalogue incorporated into the web pages.
Comments: Text which was scanned as 600 ppi bitonal images and converted to GIFF web surrogates appear inferior to 300 ppi 8-bit greyscale images converted to JPEG surrogates. Will probably stick to the latter 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: August 09 2004.