Another project finished!

Negatives blog

It’s taken 2 years and 4 months, but we have finally finished scanning all of the black and white 60-series negatives of objects in the collection. I say ‘we’, but Felicity and I probably only did about 5% of the scanning – the other 95% was done by a brilliant and extremely dedicated team of volunteers. In total, we’ve worked our way through 23 boxes of negatives to do a whopping 10265 scans!

The project started back in February 2012 as a short project funded by JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee), with the aim of digitising 3500 negatives. Working on the principle that a black and white image is infinitely better than no image, we rapidly realised that this was a brilliant way of adding images to the catalogue (as taking new photographs is very time-consuming and expensive). So we decided to just carry on, with the aid of our volunteers, until we’d done all of the negatives of objects.

Not only have we finished all of the scanning, we have also added all of these negatives to Adlib, our catalogue, and they are all available to view online (either through Adlib or Enterprise). This is thanks to one tireless volunteer, Carl, who has spent week after week after tedious week copying and pasting links. This project has made a huge difference to the percentage of our object records which now have an image attached.

So I’d like to say an enormous thank you to Alex, Anna, Anne, Anne, Becca, Beth, Carl, Charlotte, Christina, David, Diana, Doug, Emily, Emma, George, Josh, Juliet, Megan, Nina, Pablo, Phoebe, Rebecca, Steve, Stuart and Tom. THANK YOU!!!!!

2 thoughts on “Another project finished!

  1. I cannot thank these wonderful volunteers enough (and also Greta and Felicity) for their amazing commitment and contribution to this project. I probably use the database more frequently than most and it makes a staggering difference to have these images available.

    I think these photographs (or rather, these digital surrogates of photographs now so expertly scanned and connected to the contextual histories of the objects they depict) will provide an invaluable research resource in years to come and will come to support teaching, learning, and public engagement in many innovative ways that we can’t yet imagine.

    A fantastic result!

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