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ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 54| December 2001


Edmund Barton Digitisation Project—The Technical Side

Last year the Library selected a manuscript collection for digitisation, with the intention of making it available on the Internet. As 2001 was the centenary of Federation, the papers of our first Prime Minister, Sir Edmund Barton were chosen and the project commenced in early 2001.

The project presented several organisational and technical challenges. As the first attempt to digitise an entire manuscript collection, it was a valuable learning exercise for future projects of this kind. The project involved staff from many different areas of the Library with specialist expertise. Manuscripts, Preservation, Imaging Services, Multimedia and Information Technology staff worked together to complete the project to capture, store and deliver online access to the Barton Papers.

The majority of the 2000 items were captured using a flat-bed scanner, while about 100 items larger than A3 in size were captured using a high-resolution digital camera. Digital capture was carried out at 300 dpi and digital master images were stored as 24-bit RGB TIFF files. This process yielded over 5000 digital images.

The collection material itself contained features making digitisation difficult, including pencil annotations on red-brown, blue or blue-green paper which were difficult to read and correspondence material with ink bleeding on the reverse side of the paper making it difficult to scan. Some items needed to be re-scanned to obtain sufficient legibility.

Derivative images in JPEG format for viewing over the Internet were automatically created from the digital masters. These images were created at three different sizes to allow users to see an overview of an item using thumbnail images and then zoom in to larger images. All of the image files created during this project are stored on the Library’s new digital object storage system commissioned in July.

Each digital image has also been assigned a persistent identifier that is a unique and unchanging key for the image. The persistent identifier can be viewed at the bottom of each derivative digital image. The Library has developed a persistent identifier naming scheme for all its digital materials; both surrogate images of collection items and web sites captured in the PANDORA Archive. A resolver service has also been developed that redirects users to the current online location of an item based on its persistent identifier. This service has been created to solve the common problem on the Internet of the lack of persistence of resources over time and broken links that occur when a resource is moved. Having persistent identifiers and persistent web addresses for digital material will enable users of the Library’s services to cite resources with confidence and build online virtual works incorporating material from the Library’s Collection.

The final stage in the project was to create a web site that provided access to the Barton Papers with the ability to search, browse, examine and read individual image pages within a contextual display. The web site at nla.gov.au/nla.ms-ms51 has a structure based on the 13 series in the collection. These series were described in an existing collection finding aid in Encoded Archival Description (EAD) format. The finding aid was significantly upgraded during the project to incorporate additional information about collection items. The finding aid was used to automatically generate web pages describing each series and structural map files (in XML) describing the images making up an item and their relationships, e.g. pages of a diary or letter. A delivery application was written that uses the structural map files to provide web access to the derivative images and associated metadata from the finding aid.

The Barton digitisation project has enabled Library staff to gain experience with the application of the traditional library processes of selection, acquisition, storage, cataloguing, discovery and access in a digital environment. The project has been a great success, has provided technology and solutions for future projects and has produced an attractively designed, easy to use web site of continuing interest to researchers and the general public.
—Tony Boston and Andrew Stawowcyzk-Long

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Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: dthomas@nla.gov.au

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