Dumfries & Galloway Library
Dumfries & Galloway Library is a very pro-active and forward thinking organisation situated in the centre of Dumfries. The library has a large historical archive that is stored in a separate building not far from the main library itself.
The libraries archive contains many different images from the surrounding areas covering hundreds of years of local history as well as some other very valuable documents and items from further afield. The libraries archive is held on many different medias ranging from original newspapers, books, maps and drawings to photographs, film, microfiche, reeled film and glass plates.
Up until recently most of this archive had to kept locked away from the public and staff for fear of damage or destruction, the archive that was made available by the library to the public had to be studied on old film viewers a laborious process that also proved expensive because of the need for the maintaining of the outdated film viewing equipment and the staffing levels required to manage the facility. However a much more serious situation was becoming apparent, even with the library staffs excellent knowledge and expertise and the strict procedures for preservation that the library had implemented the condition of sections of the archive was beginning to deteriorate and a loss in quality apparent.
To overcome these problems, Dumfries & Galloway decided to implement an archive digitisation
and management program. The program involved selecting the key at RISK areas of the archive, identifying a suitably qualified and experienced company to carry out the required restoration, digital conversion and image indexing facility and then source the required project funding.
It was at this time that the library approached TWD (UK) to carry out a restoration and digital conversion service on their collection of rare 35mm film strips Once the program started, images dating back to the late1900 were scanned, captured and indexed into their systems, resulting in an environment which now hosts and manages images electronically for vital area’s within the libraries operational archival systems.
Library staff and in free access cases the public are now able to search for and retrieve images and other information in just a few seconds – a huge improvement over the delays previously suffered when requesting archive records, also the digitisation program has allowed much more of the archive to be made available whilst insuring that the risk of damage, destruction and deteriation has been kept to a minimum.
From a technology perspective, the digital formats used sit comfortably within the organisations existing strategies for IT. The libraries repository and all the user interfaces to it reside on standard PCs, linked by the local network. The scanned images are written to CD media, then stored on dedicated hard drives.
One of the project advantages was that the digital formats used were easy to merge and gave no
performance issues to the existing network infrastructure. Additionally, the system requires minimum housekeeping and has been found to be totally reliable.
