Digitising Archives: A Youtube Investigation

What better way to find out about which archives are being digitised than going on Youtube. It is interesting how they explain what they are doing with the archive and how it can be accessed by people on the web.

 

Netherlands digitising books, scanning and processing into word documents

 

London Pulse

 

British Library – migrating to different platforms, able to translate scripts etc

 

Find my Past.co.uk

Prepare, clean, scan, type out handwriting (transcribing), create search engine (transcribing)

1911 census- 2km physical shelving; 18million documents; cleaning process; 2 years to transcribe by 300 people

 

Oxfam

http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/News/2013/News/WTP051798.htm

http://www.oxfam.org.uk/blogs/2013/06/syria-in-the-archive

Working in Oxfam’s Stories, Film and Photography team, I spend a lot of time working with incredible pictures. But I never get tired of making new discoveries. To hold a print in your hand from decades past is like holding a delicate piece of history. A fleeting moment in time, captured and printed, stored in a box and buried away, only to be discovered more than 50 years later. There is a certain magic that happens when you start digging around in an archive. Hours can pass at a time as you leaf through prints looking for something special.

 

Getty Images

Every print online, there are 200 in the archives, every print in the archive there are 200 unseen negative: Power of the physical!

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