Government, Military & Education Archives
Case Study One
DIGITISATION OF WILLS AND PROBATE REGISTERS
- DISPLAYING IMAGES ONLINE -
THE ARCHIVES
This instituion is one of the biggest archive respositories outside London. During its 50 year history they have collected archives from all around the world, from the 12th century to the present day. Every year they welcome thousands of visitors to use their archive materials.
PROJECT BACKGROUND
TownsWeb Archiving met with staff at the Archives to discuss the digitisation, indexing and retrieval of some of their old documents. Some of these documents dated back hundreds of years and were in fragile condition.
The institution indicated that there was a need to archive some of their valuable collection and also to make the digitised images available for the public to view.
AIMS OF THE PROJECT
Due to the large number and variable state of some of the documents it was felt that a Pilot Project would be worthwhile.
The Pilot Project would provide an indication to the Institution as to:
- How long it would take to digitise, crop and process certain documents
- How long it would take to index certain documents
- The quality of the produced digitised documents
- The storage size of the produced digitised documents in various file formats
- An approximation as to how long it would take to digitise and index the collection
THE ARCHIVE TO BE DIGITISED
The pilot project would work with some of the most valuable documents in the Archives – namely:
- Wills - of which there are approximately 5000 boxes, each with 100 wills, each with 3 or 4 sheets
- Probate Registers - of which there are approximately 40, each with 200 open pages
Time and equipment permitting, the pilot project (or future project) would also look at digitising:
- Parish Records - of which there are approximately 2789 boxes, each with 12 records, each record can be quite long with up to 4 scans need to digitise one document
This collection of documents equates to:
- 1,750,000 sheets/images of Will documents
- 8,000 sheets/images of Probate Register Pages
- 33,468 sheets and 133,872 images of Parish Records
Making a total of 1,891,872 digitised images to be produced.
ONSITE DIGITISATION
The Pilot Project began with TownsWeb Archiving staff visiting the Archives
for a week with portable equipment in order to digitise a selection of the wills
and probate registers. A small amount of indexing was also carried out during
the digitisation process - this would enable the Instituion to see if it might be
feasible for indexing to be performed at the same time as the digitisation or if it
was better and quicker to wait until after the digitisation was complete.
IMAGE PROCESSING
The digitised images were cropped and processed to full colour jpeg, tiff and pdf
formats and supplied back to the Instituion on CD-Rom. The jpeg and pdf
formats had been compressed and the quality reduced. This would enable these
images to be downloaded from the internet at reasonable speed. Original
uncompressed tiff images were also supplied to the Instituion at 300dpi. These
were large files and highlighted the kind of quality that could be achieved using
this resource.
ONLINE RETRIEVAL OF IMAGES
Further indexing of the images took place after image processing and this
database along with all of the images were uploaded onto a web server. Search
Engine Software was created to allow these images to be searched and then
viewed using Adobe Acrobat Viewer. Although not all of the images have been
uploaded and are therefore not available for download - the search engine
provides a good test facility for Archives staff and potential funders.
END OF PROJECT - REPORTING
A full report was provided to the Instituion which provided detailed information
regarding such things as: time taken to digitise and process each type of
document; whether the document condition or ironing documents affected
digitisation time; whether indexing during digitisation was a possibility or not,
the file sizes of jpegs, pdfs and tiffs; internet download speeds.
A summary report was also provided to the Instituion which assessed the time
taken to complete the Pilot Project and then provided estimations and costs to
digitise, index and put online the entire archive of wills and probate registers.
TownsWeb Archiving Ltd can be contacted on
01536 713834 or on the web at
www.townswebarchiving.com or via email at
enquiries@townswebarchiving.com.
