The Cultural Heritage Digitisation service team have attended the annual Association for Historical & Fine Art Photography conference for well over a decade and have contributed to presentations at the annual conference. Susan Pettigrew the studio manager was Chair of the AHFAP Libraries and Archives Special Interest Group until the end of 2023. AHFAP is an important conference for CHDS in that it’s our network connection to the UK wide community of Heritage photography and digitisation.
For many years the conference was London centric, having been founded by London based museums. In more recent years the association has decided to expand conferences to include decentralised locations on a biannual basis, including one at Edinburgh’s National Museum two years ago. This year’s conference was at the Maritime Museum in Liverpool. The AHFAP Constitution cites the promotion of Cultural Heritage Photography, the interchange of institutional digitisation ideas and keeping pace of the latest innovations around capture and studio practice. The Conference was over two days. Day one was a series of tightly packed presentations and day two hosted a variety of workshops. I have selected two highlights from day one and one highlight from day two.
SIKH HERITAGE IN COLONIAL COLLECTIONS
John Rylands Library in Manchester hold a rare copy of the Gurdwara MS-5.
Academic fellow Gurtek Singh and Jamie Robinson Imaging Manager at Rylands have been working collaboratively to digitise and preserve this rare work. The Sikh religion considers the Gurdwara (manuscript) as a living being and the pages as limbs. It is consulted for spiritual guidance by randomly selecting a page. Gurtek explained GU = Dark and RU = Light. A Guru is a being that guides from the darkness into the light.
Gurtek and Jamie had a complicated time creating the photography for the Gurdwara. It took a lot of communication between the Sikh community, who were apprehensive over the fact that this version was in fact stolen. Gurtek even traced the officers name who had removed the Gurdwara. The Gurdwara also had an additional paragraph at the end which the community were unaware of. Modern Sikhs use printed 20th century versions of the Gurdwara which no longer display the original paragraph. The Conservation and Photography capture had to be completed in line with Sikh tradition: no alcohol to be consumed during the work and no shoes to be worn. The images are available as a PDF document through consultation with the University of Manchester, but printing is not allowed as that would be seen as creating another being.
Despite the hurdles of gaining trust from the Sikh community the Gurdwara is now housed within Rylands collections in a manner that is acceptable to the community. The Gurdwara is essentially wrapped in blankets and placed on a mattress when in storage. A special bed was built looking similar-to a small four poster bed, with a mattress to enable viewing within Sikh tradition which allowed consultation of this important historical being. It was extremely uplifting to see digitisation bringing communities together with a deeper understanding and fostering new bonds between cultures.
KEW DIGITSING FOR OUR LIVES
In 2022 The Royal Botanic Gardens Kew began a four-year project to digitise over eight million plant and fungi specimens with a view to making the collections freely available around the world. This is an enormous task and at this point they have 6 million captures completed as of November 2024! They calculated in order to meet their project schedule they would need to attain something like 140,000 captures per week. Part of the work is in house and part is completed via an external supplier. The teams doing the work comprised of 89 capture staff, 30 QA staff, 43 cameras at 40 stations, plus 75 Transcribers. The in-house team alone consisted of 25 Digitisation Officers, 23 QA Officers, 8 Data Managers and 15 Digitisation Operations & support personnel.
Crowd sourcing was popular, with this project eliciting many voluntary responses and even from a Brain Surgeon at one point. However, the point was made even Brain Surgeons had to be trained like everyone else as to what was required to capture the specimens in line with the project workflow. The overall impression was one of scale and detailed organisation. The presentation clearly outlined the number of tasks involved in such a large-scale operation and the project acts as a good barometer for scaling mass digitisation projects realistically. The model Kew presented is really robust and could also be scaled down for smaller collections.
This particular slide caught my attention because of the number of cameras in use and the model of camera.
Kew are using 43 Fujifilm GFX 100s cameras. These are entry level mirrorless medium format cameras. The sensor itself is smaller than the Phase One cameras in CHDS but larger than traditional digital DLSR cameras. They function as a midway point in camera technology terms. The pricing reflects this at around the quarter of the price of Phase One and Hasselblad standard Heritage Collections cameras. This obviously will have a considerable impact when you have to buy 43 of them for your project.
Of note in conversation during the breaks, I caught up with Neil Mclean the manager of the National Museum of Scotland’s photography studio who revealed they have been using the first iteration of the Fujifilm GFX 100 for a number of years. They were pressed to make department savings and arrived at that solution. Affordable Medium Format solutions is a relatively new thing in this sector so it was interesting to see two major institutions backing these solutions with their projects. This does however prove the point that attending the annual conference to encourage the interchange of ideas and practice is really worthwhile.
MULTISPECTRAL IMAGING FULLY AUTOMATED WORKFLOW
I attended the day 2 workshop on Multispectral Imaging. This workshop demonstrated an automated system that allows the capture of standard images, Ultra-Violet images and Infra-Red images with one shot. Each shot takes around 5 minutes and images are processed on the fly. It generates colour and false colour images in Multiband Spectrum using the Charisma Imaging standard. The shots also generate greyscale images for statistical analysis in the Narrowband Spectrum. The Phase One proprietary Rainbow software-has built-in analysis tools for immediate results. The data can be output as a .csv file which can be taken into Excel to produce charts etc. The data can also be used with an XRF machine which our Conservation team currently have and use. This new system promises a better return on investment as it can be used to capture standard white light images in addition to Multispectral images.
The system can also be used with our existing CHDS Phase One lens collection. The nature of the Multispectral sensor, requires a greater focusing accuracy to capture the different light spectrums, which in turn is a benefit to regular capture.
To highlight the systems capabilities, in this image the system managed to expose the signature of the artist Breughel from a painting held in a Swiss Museum. The authorship of the painting had been in dispute but this confirmed that the painting was indeed a Breughel which increased the valuation enormously. I can see there would be many applications within our own University Collections. The Rashid Al Din Chronicles of the World springs to mind.
Conclusion
Meeting up with colleagues from a variety of UK wide institutions all grappling with similar problems of image capture and digitisation is always illuminating and fascinating. I definitely gleaned as much in the breakout times through the interchange of ideas as I did in the presentations.
Malcolm Brown, Photographer.
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