The Heritage Materials Imaging Facility (HMIF) digitised a 15th Century illuminated manuscript, the Rossdhu Book of Hours, in September 2003
Simon Gotlieb (eProjects manager, and former manager of Heritage Materials Imaging Facility) describes the process involved in the digitisation of rare and valuable heritage books below.
Introduction
The process of digitisation on these pages is described with particular reference to the digitisation of the Rossdhu Book of Hours for the Auckland City Library. It is intended to be an example for demonstrating a digitisation workflow. No complete solutions are intended, but we hope to illustrate the steps involved and describe some difficulties you may face in such a project.
The digitisation process consists of three main steps (and many sub-steps):
- what will you do with the images?
- check your book before starting
- preparing the scanning environment
- the room environment
- the camera
- preparing the camera
- materials used to facilitate digitisation
- colour calibration and proofing
- computer equipment
This first step involves assessment and condition reporting of the work to be digitised and the preparation of the digitising environment.
- how we positioned the book
- handling difficulties
- workflow for image capture
- first digitiser's role
- second digitiser's role
The second step involves the actual digital capture of the work.
- derivative creation using Batch Scripting
- writing data for clients/Output Metadata
The third step involves the post-processing of the images, which may involve de-skewing, sharpening, addition of Metadata and creation of derivative images, and the eventual writing of the data to a transfer medium.
The HMIF advocates microfilm for extended term preservation of the intellectual content of documentary materials. Consideration should be given to preserving the images on microfilm in a separate or joint component of the imaging project.
