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.
It has been a long–held desire for the CHDS to offer a 3D Digitisation service, and although not 100% there yet, we are several steps closer. Back in 2021, Connor Wimblett did an internship with us looking into the feasibility of offering 3D for the Heritage Collections. You can find out more by reading his blog here.
This spring the short but broad digitisation project, OneHealth, reached its end. The OneHealth project was focused on early animal welfare history, utilising new material brought in from a trio of organisations: Royal Zoological Society of Scotland, The Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies, and the animal welfare charity OneKind. During those 6 months, we had a vast and diverse materials pass through our studios. From the historically rich early records of Edinburgh Zoo to morbidly curious Veterinary School implements to the delightfully pet centric magazines of the OneKind charity, the project spanned a wide range of items.
Today is World Photography Day, ‘an annual celebration of the art, craft, science and history of photography.’ This year, we’d like to turn the spotlight on the amazing photographers working in the Cultural Heritage Digitisation Service by allowing them to highlight their favourite collection items they’ve photographed, and to share a piece of their own work as well. We hope their insights into the medium and their technical process will prove both interesting and informative!
We’ve been working on digitising The Witness for quite some time now. Here’s a little background information from our previous post on the publication: ‘A twice weekly newspaper, The Witness was created by the Church of Scotland in 1840 and edited by Hugh Miller, an influential writer, geologist and stone mason. In 1843 The Church of Scotland was faced with 200 ministers walking out citing political interference, an event which came to be known as the Disruption and led to the Free Church being established. Presbyterianism is founded on the basis that the people make the decisions, not an elite hierarchy, and the only head of the church, is God. This makes The Witness newspaper a fantastic primary source covering a significant event in Scotland’s social and religious history, and as such, a prime candidate for digitisation.’
As the editions are bound into large format volumes, we decided to contract the digitisation to a company called Autodocs. Digitisation operators Miranda and Marian then took over the quality control and processing of the files and made some fun discoveries along the way – let’s hear from them!
Last month, team members Marian and Miranda attended Knowledge Exchange Week, hosted by the University of Edinburgh. This was the fifth time the event had been held, and the theme was the ‘Open Library.’ The event also incorporated the Edinburgh Open Research Conference. After a whirlwind week of programming and networking, we thought it might be interesting to hear more about what they learned and experienced.
How often do you walk past a 1000 year old rune stone? The answer is every day, if you work or study near the Main Library!
Earlier this year I completed a project photographing James Skene’s Album of Sketches in greater detail. When I came across his runestone illustration again I was intrigued and did some research, making the surreal discovery that the subject was a 3 minute walk away. At 50 George Square behind the Scandinavian Studies Department, stands a Swedish runestone with a curious history. This 1.3 tonne granite stone found its new home here at the university in 2019, having been moved several times prior.
I began working with the Cultural Heritage Digitisation Services team last November, as a Digitisation Operator. Before joining the team, I was digitising plant specimens in the Herbarium of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. I am also a photographer, with my work most recently appearing in the Accidentally Wes Anderson exhibition which opened in London December 2023.
2024 is shaping up to be an exciting year, with several projects in the works. Some of these have been in the planning stages for a long time, and we really couldn’t be more eager to finally get started. With that in mind, we thought it might be fun to provide a ‘movie trailer’ of sorts, with a short preview of each project we plan to tackle in 2024:
At the beginning of November, I was given the opportunity to attend the Association of Historical and Fine Art Photography (AHFAP) Conference 2023 at the Barbican Centre in London. The keynote speech by Catherine Croft from The Twentieth Century Society gave an overview of the history of the development of the Barbican, and its relationship with the photographers who have attempted to capture it – each approaching it from a unique perspective. I found all the talks fascinating, but I wanted to highlight a few in this blog that I felt captured some of the main themes I noticed in the conference this year.
I am a recent addition to the Cultural Heritage Digitisation Service team. I was previously a studio photographer, with an additional specialism in biological and microscopic photography. My scientific artwork has been exhibited in Edinburgh and was recently shortlisted for the Royal Photographic Society’s International Open Call. My previous digitisation and archival experience stems from my master’s degree in biological photography, where we had an extensive selection of taxidermy animals, skeletons and pinned insects. Some moths were over 200 years old!
