Government, Military & Education Archives
Case Study Two
DIGITISATION OF SCHOOL LOG BOOKS
THE HERITAGE HUB
This facility is home to a Scottish Archive Local & Family
History Centre situated in the heart of a beautiful, picturesque
area.
The Heritage Hub, built to BS5454:2000 standards, provides
excellent conditions for archival documents, some of which are
around 500 years old, ensuring their long term preservation. The
air conditioned stores feature 2km of electronic shelving.
PROJECT BACKGROUND
The Heritage Hub contacted TownsWeb Archiving asking if we
could take a look at their huge collection of old school log books
- some of which dated back to the early eighteenth century and a
few of which were in poor condition.
TownsWeb Archiving visited the Archives to take a look at the
books and to offer advice about performing the digitisation
onsite (at their premises) and offsite (at TownsWeb Archiving’s
premises). Sample images were produced to ensure that the
client would be happy with the quality and format of the output
files.
AIMS OF THE PROJECT
The Heritage Hub had many reasons for digitising this unique
collection of school log books and were keen to ensure that this
digitisation project would fully enable them to:
- Re-print the books from the images (if the need arose)
- Display the compressed jpeg images over the web (in the long term)
- Easily access the high quality tiff images over the local network
THE ARCHIVE TO BE DIGITISED
This collection of school records meant that there were 112 log
books containing 31,264 pages that needed to be digitised.
The records to be captured were dated prior to 1900 to ensure
that when these pages were made available for the public to
view that there would be no data protection issues.
It is believed that as and when these records are put online that
they will be the largest most comprehensive set of school log
records available to view by the general public.
ONSITE DIGITISATION
The complexity of transporting 112 very old and fragile books
meant that the decision was made to perform the digitisation
onsite within the main offices of the Heritage Hub.
TownsWeb Archiving provided a portable flat-bed system and
also staff to be onsite for one week to digitise the collection.
IMAGE PROCESSING
Following the onsite digitisation, the images were taken offsite
and within two weeks all of the images were cropped and
processed to full colour tiff and jpeg formats. All images were
supplied back to the Heritage Hub on an external hard drive.
The jpeg formats were compressed and the quality reduced.
These files are ideal to be downloaded over the web at speed.
ACCESS TO IMAGES
The images were named sequentially and then placed into
folders that were named the same as the books. With all of the
books and images on a single external hard drive, locating and
accessing the image files was made very easy.
END OF PROJECT
TownsWeb Archiving Ltd continue to work with and support
staff at the Heritage Hub and the relationship has blossomed.
TownsWeb Archiving Ltd can be contacted on
01536 713834 or on the web at
www.townswebarchiving.com or via email at
enquiries@townswebarchiving.com.
