Corporate/Business Archives
Case Study One
DIGITISATION OF ARTWORKS, PATTERNS & DESIGNS, MAPS, MANUSCRIPTS & PHOTOGRAPHS
- DISPLAYING IMAGES ONLINE -
THE COMPANY
This Midlands based company began trading in 1815 and attained a Royal
Warrant in 1901.
PROJECT BACKGROUND
Some of the worlds most famous and talented artists have created designs for the
this Company. Each original design was painted or drawn onto paper, cloth,
canvas and some in bound books creating a unique and highly valuable archive
of more than 1 million pieces. Due to the popularity of TV programmes such as
Antiques Roadshow and Room In The Attic, many members of the public are
interested to know the value of items produced by this company.
To know the true value of a piece requires searching through the archive to
locate original designs and information that can specifically identify that piece.
Locating such information can often be extremely time consuming as both the
Archive Centre and its contents are very inaccessible. Being so inaccessible has
also made it difficult for the company to create new revenue opportunities in
terms of putting items on display and licensing of this original artwork.
AIMS OF THE PROJECT
TownsWeb Archiving met with with the Company’s Archives Manager to
discuss how we could help him archive and secure this precious collection and
how to make them more accessible to him, the staff and possibly the public.
Before starting the project we provided a report which detailed:
- 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 digitised documents
- The storage size of the 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
This unique archive is immense with over 1 million individual pieces of artwork
on paper, card, canvas and cloth. Thousands of bound volumes containing
designs, manuscripts and photographs also needed to be digitised.
ONSITE DIGITISATION & INDEXING
Some of the items within the Archive are insured for £millions and despite
assurances being offered and insurance policies being in place - performing the
digitisation onsite meant peace of mind for the Company. The project, lasting in
excess of 9 months, involved taking a portable system and TownsWeb
Archiving’s own staff to the offices of the Company in order to digitise the
collection. Each digitised file was simply given a unique reference number
within a logical directory structure. Performing the indexing after the
digitisation meant that the imaging could be performed very quickly.
IMAGE PROCESSING
The digitised images were cropped and processed to full colour tiff and jpeg
formats. The size of some of the pieces was around A0 and with a resolution of
300dpi this meant that some of the file sizes were around 100Mb in size. All
images were supplied back to the Company on multiple 400Gb external hard
drives. The jpeg formats were compressed and the quality reduced. This would
enable the images to be downloaded over the web at reasonable speeds.
ACCESS TO IMAGES
Indexing of the images was a relatively lengthy exercise and could only be
performed by the Company’s own experienced staff. The information that was
captured was relatively detailed and would allow searches on artist, date and era
(e.g. Victorian, Art Deco etc.). Much of the artwork was not signed or dated and
therefore other detailed indexing took place which enabled searches by typing in
free text - such as ‘red roses’, ‘peacock butterfiles’ and ‘man on horseback’.
Thumbnails were made of the images and these along with larger images and the
indexed data were uploaded onto a web server and plugged into TownsWeb
Archiving’s ARCVIEW SOFTWARE. This online system is secure and
accessible by staff wherever there is an internet connection. There are plans in
the future to allow licencees and members of the public to access the system.
END OF PROJECT - SUPPORT
TownsWeb Archiving Ltd continue to work with and support staff at the
Company and there are plans for the two company’s to come together in a joint
venture to enable parts of the archive to be made available to the public.
TownsWeb Archiving Ltd can be contacted on
01536 713834 or on the web at
www.townswebarchiving.com or via email at
enquiries@townswebarchiving.com.
