I am thrilled to have joined Royal College of Music Museum as a digital preservation graduate intern and am happy to share my journey with you here. In sum, my work was to support the digitisation of museum objects as well as assisting with the long-term preservation of digital assets. Read more…
Everyone likes high resolution images: researchers look at details in painting to spot repairs and pentimenti. Media creators need high resolution images for print media. And certainly there are scores of laypeople who enjoy getting lost in the details of a painting. Making high quality images available online can be a good way for archives to stand out and attract new users. (more…)
IIIF stands for International Image Interoperability Framework and is a standard to deliver images over the web and has existed since 2011. Normally, a website operator embeds an image in a website, which is then downloaded and displayed for visitors in their browsers. The vast majority of images that can be seen on the web is delivered from web servers to users in this fashion. Simple. IIIF is a more involved way to deliver images. On the server side, it requires not only a web server, but an image server. On the user side, it not only requires a browser, but an IIIF viewer. So, why would anyone go through the hassle of inventing this standard, inventing image servers, and inventing IIIF viewers? (more…)
Today we bring to you the Public Records Office in Kwun Tong, Hong Kong. This article talks about the user experience in the office and the history of establishing an archives law in Hong Kong. (more…)
Today we visited the superstar of British archives: the National Archive in Kew. They hold books, scrolls, and maps, and everything else archive worthy from British history. (more…)
The London Natural History Museum faces—like many other museums in London—the pleasant problem of holding so many important objects that they cannot all be on display at the same time. The public is invited to visit the museum archives so as long as they can demonstrate their research interest to the museum. We recently visited the archive to look at slabs of two species of saurus, but for us the thrill of the visit began a long time before the actual visit. (more…)
Usually mineral collections held by museums are not exactly crowd pullers. That can be seen on weekends, when the main halls of London’s Natural History Museum are crammed while their mineral collections are practically deserted. The lucky ones among us studying geology not only enjoy the freedom of roaming around those collections all by themselves, they are also reported to be the happiest among all universities students [1] as well as enjoying the highest salaries among all graduates [2]. (more…)