Archive for the ‘Digitisation’ Category

John Robinson diary, 1837-1838

Recently I was privileged to photograph the Diary of John Robinson, kept by Robinson while on board the convict ship William Sardinia on a Journey from Dublin to Sydney, nla.ms-ms1845, a record of an amazing journey, recounting both it’s author’s experiences, and those of the other passengers aboard the William Sardinia, as it sailed towards [...]

Happy New Year Australia, 8 million plus Newspaper pages now available on Trove

We know that digitised newspapers on Trove is really popular with many people. They read historic newspapers with a lot of interest, many trying hard to find out if their forebears made it to the newsprint. The more eager of them even spend hours and hours correcting the electronically generated text. At the Library we [...]

Frank Hurley Album World War I 1914-1918

At the end of September 2012, I digitized an album of Photographs of World War 1, campaigns in France and Belgium from 1948-1918, attributed to Frank Hurley. The album was in great condition, with little wear to the pages or the photographic prints, and minimal discolouring or foxing. The album had been presented to the [...]

Over 7 Million newspaper pages delivered

In amongst the processes of finalising our various contracts for the 2011-12 financial year, working on finalising the details of content for 2012-13, the fact that we’ve delivered the 7 Millionth newspaper page almost slipped my notice! As a reflection of the efforts of the team, up to March this year, we’ve delivered over 1.5 [...]

A song to remember: digitising Symphony Australia’s concert itineraries.

In late November 2011, the Digitisation and Photography branch embarked on a trial of the SMA Overhead Scanners that are used in our Document Supply section.  The intention was to test the use of these devices for capture of the Symphony Australia collection of concert touring schedules and artist itineraries, an archival collection documenting the [...]

Australian Home Companion and Band of Hope journal

In June 2011, the Digitisation and Photography Branch (DAP) undertook a new type of project, the capture of the Australian home companion and Band of hope, a mid 19th century journal. What made this different was that it was our first attempt at in-house journal digitisation which involved the capture of thousands rather than hundreds [...]

Community Heritage Grants 2011

The National Library is calling for applications for the 2011 Community Heritage Grants.

Efficiency gains with new scanner

In 2010 the National Library acquired a large format roller scanner. The scanner, a Colortrac Gx+ T42 series, is situated in the Maps Branch and the equipment has been a boon to Digitisation and Photography staff. The scanner has high resolution wide format scan capabilities in a variety of formats including TIFF, JPEG and PDF, [...]

Life in the Hill End goldfields 1872 and a mystery to solve

The Library recently digitised the Album of photographs of gold mining, buildings, residents and views at Hill End and environs, New South Wales, 1872-1873. This album is part of the B.O. Holtermann archive of Merlin and Bayliss photographic prints of New South Wales and Victoria. The album contains 550 albumin sepia toned photographs. As the [...]

A photographers life

After spending the best part of my working life as a photographer, I have decided to pull the plug. It was late January 1981 when I entered this building (National Library of Australia) thinking that I knew quite a lot about photography; after all I spent five long years studying photography and worked as a [...]