Expert digitisation consultants
Inhouse collection & delivery service
Accredited digitisation studio team
Highly accurate results
Instantaneous digital content searches
Capture data from any material type
Showcase your collections online
Improve access & discoverability 
Fully immersive virtual experiences
Registers & Personnel Records
TownsWeb Archiving’s digitisation technicians have a wealth of experience in the digitisation of registers and personnel records.
These are often too valuable or fragile to be unbound for scanning conversion, so our specialised overhead scanning equipment captures the entire page while sophisticated software provides curvature correction on all pages.
Digitisation not only protects material from loss or damage, but also makes the records more accessible through handwritten transcription. Our team can transcribe those all important details in order to make the content fully searchable, transcribing into fields such as forename, surname, date of birth, date of death and location, for example.
Find out how much your project could cost
Visit our digitisation studio – See how our Book Scanning service works
Hear what our clients have to say about our digitisation services
TownsWeb Archiving have proved very able and extremely helpful in supporting us to bring a local heritage alive for local people. We would certainly recommend TownsWeb Archiving to other libraries, museums and archives.
Exhibition and Display Officer
We are delighted with the results. Without TownsWeb Archiving’s services we could not have completed the work in time and on budget. Their staff have been nothing but approachable, helpful and attentive and I can strongly recommend their services.
Head of Digital
TownsWeb offered us a complete end-to-end service, from scanning and transcription, to web design and content management software. Their work was completed quickly and to a high standard, and we are extremely pleased with the results.
Information & Archives Officer
Digitisation Frequently Asked Questions
We use bespoke book cradles, high-resolution flatbed scanners and a range of high-resolution cameras, offering non-contact capture of your registers and personal records. Our equipment can capture single page or double-page spreads creating output formats in TIFF, JPEG (JPEG2000), PDF (PDFA) or any other industry-standard image format you may require. We can also create further surrogate files, such as OCR’d multi-page PDFs, MS Word and eBooks.
All files are captured by our highly trained digitisation technicians using overhead, daylight balanced, non-heat producing lighting, before undergoing a formal quality assurance checking procedure. The final step in the process is the delivery of your electronic files by hard drive.
As standard, TWA survey all material prior to any digitisation project being carried out to ensure that it can withstand the scanning process. If there is evidence of fragility, brittleness, and/or mould, or any other signs of damage within your registers or personal records, then recommendations will be made for how to repair and stabilise the content appropriately.
There are many things that need to be taken into consideration when costing your digitisation project, such as:
- Fragility
- The scale of the collection
- Whether items are contained in sleeves
- Whether photographs need to be cleaned
Consequently, it’s impossible to give a definitive answer as to cost, but you can get a rough estimate using our digitisation quote calculator below.
There are two main reasons for choosing to digitise your collections. Firstly, digitisaton protects and safeguards your material from loss, whether that be through disaster or wear and tear, and ensures you always have a high quality backup in place should the unthinkable happen. Secondly, digitisation primes your items for online access, which means, through publishing platforms such as our very own PastView, you can ingest all of your data and share your collections on a global scale. Ask us for more information about publishing.
Calculate the cost of digitising your bound volume collections
Simply input your specifications into the FREE digitisation quote calculator below, to get an estimate of how much your project might cost. The prices quoted are indicative for your material quantity and type but are subject to any additional costs such as file naming, folder naming and any post-processing requirements you may have.
If you don’t see your specific material listed it might be that your content is more suited to an informal chat.
Calculate your project costs
Enter your project details, material type and email using the form provided
Review your quote
Look out for your free no obligation quote, received straight to your inbox
Speak with our consultants
Book a discovery call if you have any questions or wish to proceed with your project
Bound Volume Digitisation Quote Calculator
Important Note: We charge a standard £500 project set-up and management fee in addition to the cost of digitisation.
Your Registers and Personnel Records
Digitisation places your registers and personnel records in the perfect format to capture the valuable data contained within them, offering great potential for system integration and online access and discovery through our five phase Cemetery Solution:
- Phase 1: Digitisation: convert your valuable records to digital while benefiting from a free look-up service
- Phase 2: Transcription: use key information and metadata within your registers to create manually typed records
- Phase 3: Offline Access: enjoy immediate ‘real feel’ searches against your digital records through our BookViewer software
- Phase 4: Online Management & Access: allow members of your team to access and manage your digital records across locations
- Phase 5: Public Access: enable public access through a Chronicle website with filtered search and options for revenue generation Learn more about TWAs Cemetery Solution