Digitising photographs: a research project
Our content partners often have lots of photos alongside the audiovisual content in their collection. That’s why – since March 2019 – we’ve been investigating if and how we can harness our expertise in mass digitisation to digitise photos, and accepting collections of digital photographs which we receive as part of our digital intake.
Album met negatieven Stadsarchief Kortrijk
Analoge fotocollectie Huis van Alijn
Our photograph digitisation research focuses mainly on the technical aspects and exploring various possibilities, and we think it’s important to establish links with our existing specialist networks for this. Lots of expertise has already been built up both nationally and internationally, so we don’t need to reinvent the wheel.
In our first year of research – from March 2019 to May 2020 – we wanted to find out what knowledge was already available, where the most urgent needs were, and what exactly these ‘representative’ Flemish photo collections consisted of. We did this by:
Exploring existing specialist networks, both nationally and internationally;
Defining and identifying materials, techniques and ‘representativeness’;
Making an inventory of the scope and condition of the photographic content in the collections, in the first instance from our content partners, as well as looking at existing best practices for photograph digitisation.
All our findings were compiled in a summary report.
From May 2020, we’re investigating how to digitise and archive the collections we’ve researched in a sustainable way. A steering committee comprised of representatives from our content partners and other experts is supervising the entire project.
What if my photo collection can’t wait?
Once we’ve completed our research phase, we’ll need to see if we can help make photo digitisation operational. Does your organisation’s photo collection need digitising urgently, and do you want to set up your own project for this? Then make sure you read the guidelines on the CEST project website (in Dutch). Minimum and recommended guidelines are always suggested, so you can decide for yourself what’s a workable solution for your collection.