We can all agree that the internet has radically changed our lives. Particularly over the last 18 months many people came to rely on it to stay connected, buy essentials and continue working. As an archive service we have been working on harnessing the potential the internet offers for a long time.
But there is one question that keeps coming up: why aren’t all of our collections available online?
Well, some of them are!
Dorset was one of the first counties to digitise a significant quantity of records relating to family history and make them available via Ancestry.com. This dramatically increased access to these collections with over 3.5 million views of Dorset records on Ancestry every year. This has the additional benefit of reducing the handling of our most popular collections, thus aiding their preservation.
Increasingly we are collecting born-digital records – those which were created using technology and have never existed in a physical form. We are already making some of this content available online via our catalogue, where data protection and copyright considerations allow.
We have also undertaken some large-scale digitisation projects in recent years, either with the help of volunteers or as part of externally funded projects. We are working on making more of this available too.
What about everything else?
It may be useful here to quantify what everything means. The repositories at Dorset History Centre currently house approximately 52,400 boxes. An average box contains around 500 individual pages full of decisions, discoveries, drama, design and deals. Let’s see what digitising just one of these boxes entails.
- Assessment: before any image capture occurs, the physical condition of archive documents is assessed and sensitive information and copyright considerations identified. Conservation activity may be required to clean, flatten or repair a document so it can be digitised.
- Capture: the method used to capture an image depends entirely on the physical form of the document – its size, format and previous storage conditions all have an influence.
- Metadata: when an image is captured information such as the catalogue reference number (metadata) is recorded so we can find the image again later and know what it is.
- Post-processing: both images and metadata are checked to ensure consistent quality.
- Preservation: the file is uploaded to our digital repository to ensure its long-term preservation.
- Access: from here the image(s) can be made available for researchers to see.
As you can see, digitisation is a resource intensive activity. Each stage of the process takes time and incurs a cost. For an average* box, the preparation, conservation, image capture and ingest to the digital repository would take about 15 working days and cost £3,600. This is without the ongoing investment required to ensure the preservation and future accessibility of the image. There is also a significant carbon footprint associated with digitising collections and storing digital images. You can see how this quickly adds up!
*archives are by their nature unique so there is no such thing as an average box! These statistics are therefore all an estimate based on previous experience and available data.
So what does get digitised?
Of course, we want to continue to improve awareness of and access to our collections, and digitisation plays a role. To make best use of available resources we must prioritise collections for digitisation according to preservation and access needs.
Our top priority is those collections which will become inaccessible if we do not digitise them. For example, during the Herbert Collection project we digitised a large quantity of acetate negatives which were suffering from vinegar syndrome – an irreversible process of decay. Digitisation allows us to preserve the images despite the originals’ inevitable degradation. Formats can also become inaccessible as the technology used to read or play them disappears. We have been working to digitise much of our audio-visual collections held on media like film, VHS and audio cassette. Fortunately, the majority of our collections will remain unchanged for decades to come, housed in specialist archival packaging in our environmentally controlled repositories.
Other priorities include heavily used collections, such as those already on Ancestry.com, which will assist many people with their research.
Of course, all of our records are free for consultation in our search-room, and for anything else you wish to view but cannot visit, we offer a digitisation service.
A friend wrote a book about Coleman, a photographic company he worked for many decades ago; his first employment as a teenager. The company was a Bournemouth company. It has long since gone. He is willing to donate a pdf of his book to the Dorset History Centre. Do you accept items like this – purely digital. Are their ‘varieties’ of pdf?
Hi Alan, thanks for your message. We do indeed accept digital versions of books as you describe. Your friend is welcome to email us at ‘archives@dorsetcouncil.gov.uk’ with the PDF and we will add it into our collections!