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Hi, I'm David Reeves
I'm the Associate Chief Librarian at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington
We've undertaken a huge project to digitise a number of our photographic collections during 2010 and 2011
while the National Library building has been undergoing some major refurbishment
we've been able to dedicate around 20 staff to this special project.
Its taking important negative collections from our photographic archive
Traditionally these have only been through prints like these
and although we've been digitising them slowly over the last 10 years or so
this project is a real step up in the volume that we're able to produce.
So heres a video telling you about the process we're going through.
Images for the Pictures Online project are digitised from the original negatives.
The Alexander Turnbull Library houses it collections in special controlled atmosphere stores.
The temperature in these stores is kept at 2 degrees for film and 15 degrees for glass plates.
Air quality in these stores is also tightly controlled.
Here some of the staff from Pictures Online retrieve the boxes of Whites Aviation negatives.
They record the location of the negatives in an inventory
then they move the collections to the imaging studios for digitisation.
The Whites Aviation collection is one of the first to be digitised by the team.
It is a large collection numbering around 90,000 images
and as well as film many of the negatives are on glass plates of different sizes.
Negatives are captured using Canon 5D mark ii cameras over a daylight balanced lightbox.
Each camera is teathered to a PC and controlled by software.
Exposure tests are completed and the image saved directly to the server.
Here the negative is rehoused in an acid free archival enclosure.
Scanned images are opened in Photoshop where they are saved as an unedited 16bit tiff.
The image is carefully cropped.
Shortcut keys have been specially made so that the image may be quickly and easily
inverted
horizontally flipped
converted to greyscale
and the black and white levels adjusted.
The edited image is then saved as an 8bit modifed master
and a jpeg derivative for descriptive work is created at the same time.
All images are described briefly on the libraries database TAPUHI.
Sets of records with pre-populated fields are made on TAPUHI using templates.
This staff member is adding to one of these records.
A brief description and date is added using information from the images
details recorded on the original negative sleeves
and in the negative registers.
Staff think about the end user and use key words to make the images discoverable.
Conservation is integral to the project.
Old enclosures made of materials that can cause decay are replaced.
Some negatives need additional cleaning so that they can be digitised at their best.
Cracked and broken glass negatives are repaired prior to digitisation
with adhesives or new glass supports.
The original plates will be digitised and seen at their best.
After quality checking the files are uploaded into the libraries
National Digital Heratage Archive
and then delivered through the libraries Timeframes website.
They will be gradually added to the site over the life of the project.