Digitise A Book

[Amice Golden]

Findinga sustainable competitive advantage in the manufacturing sector is easier said than done, but digital transformation can help with whichever strategy (or strategies) your organisation chooses to pursue.

Those seeking to become a cost leader will find that digitalisation offers a clear route to savings. Digitalised processes are easier to automate, they are faster and there is less waste because everything is joined up. Returning to our analogy of the filing system, consider the difference between searching through a filing cabinet for the information you need compared to searching a fully digitised database.

Digital transformation offers ways for companies to differentiate themselves too, especially in terms of user experience. When every touchpoint is digitalised, the experience of interacting with an organisation and its products becomes much simpler. The customer journey becomes one smooth, continuous operation regardless of the communication channels. Digital transformation allows organisations to get the most from the data they collect, understanding, predicting and acting on customer requirements at lightning speed.

Hexagon helps manufacturers navigate the sometimes challenging process of digitalising manufacturing. Our portfolio of manufacturing software and hardware connects devices and systems to unlock the potential of your data, making your manufacturing smarter and accelerating the journey towards true autonomy.

In the world of manufacturing, there can be a big difference between very similar sounding terms, so if you enjoyed this blog, discover another wording subtlety in our blog what is the difference between accuracy and precision.

We have been imaging our own vast collection of records since the 1960s, initially producing microfilm until 2015, and, for the last 15 years, producing digital images. While we continue to digitise our own material, we also use our expertise to offer a professional digitisation service for others.

We offer bespoke image creation and capture services for projects of more than one document. For research-quality digital images, or prints, of singular or part documents, please visit our Record Copying pages. For bespoke high resolution images for publication to Image Library.

The answers to this question might seem obvious to a historian: to make collections accessible to remote audiences; to enable text searching, and to allow for new types of research. Yet how often do you pose the question of a resource you are using: why has this been digitised?

The subsequent decade saw a move towards a presumption in favour of digitisation as a means of opening up archives. The widespread closure of archives to the public in March 2020, as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, further tilted the scales in favour of digital access. Rather than driving visitors to the archive reading room as it did 20 years ago, today digitisation is perceived to be of sufficient quality to keep researchers away.

Although there are many criteria for selection, the priority has always been to digitise popular material. This is because it has benefits both for users (in providing convenient access); archive staff (minimising reproduction and retrieval enquiries for the same material), and for the objects themselves (since repeated handling causes damage). This was unproblematic when researchers expected archives to only have a small proportion of their collections available digitally and there was a tacit understanding about what would be available.

Faced with an online interface of millions of images, it is easy for researchers to assume that the proportion of digitised material is much higher than it actually is. Yet the UK National Archives has only digitised an estimated 10% of its collection, a figure that is likely to be significantly lower for the majority of UK archives.

In the case of the Gorrie Collection, the entire Fonds is available digitally, but this is unusual. There are a combination of physical and legal restrictions that prevent a significant number of archival items from being digitised, which makes digitisation of a complete collection rare. Over the last decade the Tate Archive has embarked on a particularly ambitious digitisation programme, making more than 75,000 items available.

Digitisation means a doubling of preservation efforts, with both the physical and digital version now requiring ongoing care and maintenance. At the very least a digitised copy requires storage, with the attendant costs, while proper maintenance means regular checking to ensure that the digital file remains usable and uncorrupted over time.

With some older digitisation projects, now approaching their 20th anniversary, archivists are also increasingly having to find ways to preserve the websites that host the digitisation projects, alongside the original documents and digitised images, as examples of scholarly output. Yet a 2017 study found that even well-regarded resources like Early English Books Online were regularly being cited as if the writer had looked at the original document instead of the digitised version. These practices make it difficult for archive professionals to advocate for funding to both maintain and create new digital resources.

Digitisation opens up a lot of opportunities, both in providing access to audiences who might not have previously been able to travel to see the documents and in enabling new types of research. As more collections are digitised, it will be crucial for researchers to be able both to approach digital collections critically, and to articulate to funding bodies why they sometimes still need to look at the original.

Whilst glass plate negatives can be digitised using a flatbed scanner (pictured below) and achieve good outputs, we believe that a DSLR camera and lightbox set-up (pictured above) produces the best image results. Of course, this is dependent on the model and spec of the scanner and camera being used. This type of setup also avoids pressure being applied to the plates by a scanner hood, which can cause them to snap due to age or the way they have been stored.

Personally, once we have scanned all of the plates we prefer to move the RAW files into Capture1 where we can calibrate the images manually, rather than relying on the scanner to auto calibrate.

To remove the majority of this dirt the plates can be lightly dusted with a hand held bulb duster (air blower) prior to digitisation. However, it is important to consider the condition of the glass plates before dusting because, if the emulsion is deteriorating or flaking, dusting can damage the image.

If using a DSLR and lightbox set-up to digitise your glass plates, we recommend placing them with the emulsion (matte) side facing upwards. This ensures the clearest capture, as the side bearing the image is closer to the camera lens, and it also reduces the risk of damage to the image on the plate, as there is no direct contact with it.

When using a flatbed scanner, the glass scanner bed and the glass plates themselves can easily be scratched. This can happen while placing and removing the plates or as a result of tiny particles of dirt and grit that may remain on the plates after cleaning. Both can negatively affect image quality. If using a scanner with a variable focus head, we recommend placing a transparent mylar or acetate sheet over the scanner bed to help prevent this from happening. This, together with taking care when placing plates onto the scanner, will protect both the scanner bed and the glass plates themselves from damage.

This technique can still be applied using a scanner with a fixed focus head, but may result in some minor loss of image quality due to the glass plate being further away from the scanner head than it would otherwise be.

If you are using a flatbed scanner, depending on the thickness of the glass plates being scanned and the depth of the bed of the scanner being used, there may be some pressure placed on the glass plates by the hood of the scanner during the digitisation process. This can potentially damage the plates. This risk can be mitigated by raising the hood of the scanner slightly (approx. 1-5mm is ideal). Some scanners allow the height of the hood when closed to be adjusted, but this can also be achieved by placing felt, foam, or cardboard strips around the edge of the scanner to cushion and elevate the lid slightly.

Not having the hood in contact with the glass plate also decreases the potential risk of the plate being inadvertently lifted up and dropped (due to the suction created by glass-on-glass) when the scanner hood is opened.

As standard, we recommend scanning glass plate negatives at a minimum resolution of 600ppi, depending on the size of the original plate, to uncompressed TIFF format as a master file. Compressed lower resolution surrogate JPEG files can then be produced from these master TIFFs.

We recommend digitising glass plate negatives at the highest pixel depth available, to capture as much tonal information as possible. However, this can be impractical due to large file sizes and longer scanning times (which, if outsourcing, can result in increased costs). We find that, for the majority of the organisations we work with, 16-bit pixel depth is ample for most glass plate digitisation projects.

As always, the decision to capture in colour or greyscale should be made on the basis of the aims of the digitisation project. If the intent is simply to preserve the content of the glass plate collection and allow access to it digitally, then greyscale will likely provide the clearest and most useful images. However, if the purpose is to create a master archival image of the plate, then full colour may offer the truest representation of the artefact.

We hope this blog proves helpful in understanding how to best digitise your collection of glass plate negatives and we wish you the best of luck with your project. However, should you prefer to outsource your digitisation project then take a look at the specialist services we offer below:

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