Corporate/Business Archives
Case Study Two
DIGITISATION OF HAND-WRITTEN REGISTERS
- GRAPHICALLY UPDATING AND MAINTAINING RECORDS -
THE COMPANY
This company was established in London in 1814, the year before the battle of
Waterloo. As early as 1838, Queen Victoria is recorded as having bought a
product from this company. The company was granted its first Royal Warrant in
1868 by The Prince of Wales.
PROJECT BACKGROUND
Some of the worlds richest and most famous figures own items produced by this
company. Records of these transactions along with every other item purchased
since 1814 to the present day is recorded within approximately 35 very large
ledger books.
With only one copy of these precious books they were very vulnerable.
Additionally, these books are still being used on a daily basis in order to locate
information about items and customers and also to complete new information
about new sales and alterations to previously sold items.
AIMS OF THE PROJECT
TownsWeb Archiving met with the company to discuss the project. The aims of
the project were to:
- Ensure all of the books were archived for disaster recovery purposes
- Allow faster access to the records within the books
- Allow new records to be added electronically and existing records to be maintained
THE ARCHIVE TO BE DIGITISED
The books were stored within the company’s main retail premises in London.
The 35 books were in reasonably good condition considering their age, however,
some of the handwritten text was faded and difficult to read. Some of the pages
had already been put onto microfiche, however, having looked at these images
they were of poor quality. The decision was therefore taken to re-digitise each
and every one of the 10,000 pages within the books.
ONSITE DIGITISATION & INDEXING
Due to the location of the books it was decided that the digitisation would be
best done onsite at the Company’s offices in London. TownsWeb Archiving’s
own staff and specialist equipment were sent onsite for a period of three days.
Each digitised file was given a unique sequential reference number within a
logical directory structure. One of the aims of the project was to enable ‘quick’
searches to be performed. Fields were captured from the hand written records
that would allow staff to quickly find records based on product type and date.
IMAGE PROCESSING
The digitised images were cropped and processed to greyscale tiff and jpeg
formats. All images were supplied back to the Company on a single external
hard drive. The jpeg formats were compressed and the quality reduced. This
would enable the images to be accessed quickly on any computer.
ACCESSING IMAGES & MAINTAINING RECORDS
Two pieces of software have been provided to the Company. The first allows
images to be searched via a database. After entering a product type and/or dates
the page images that matched that criteria are shown. The software allows these
pages to be viewed, printed, emailed and faxed. Individual sections of the pages
can also be copied and pasted into other applications such as Microsoft Word.
This software also allows database records to be added and changed.
The second piece of software allows page images to be opened and graphically
changed. Staff wanted to keep the authenticity of maintaining the product books
and now have the ability to do this electronically rather than manually.
END OF PROJECT - SUPPORT
TownsWeb Archiving Ltd provided full training and bespoke manuals in the use
of the supplied software. Furthermore, on the request of the Company,
TownsWeb Archiving Ltd hold a full backup of all of the images and data which
was provided to them. This ensures further peace of mind with regards to
protecting the records. We also continue to work with and support the Company.
TownsWeb Archiving Ltd can be contacted on
01536 713834 or on the web at
www.townswebarchiving.com or via email at
enquiries@townswebarchiving.com.
