Category: <span>News</span>

A photograph of a highly decorative manuscript with art of flowers, insects, and birds
Esther Inglis Manuscript – Photo by Anna Pike, Project Curator

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: 

Cultural Heritage Digitisation News Projects

Image taken in a lecture theatre in the Barbican Centre. Taken from the perspective of the audience looking towards a screen with the AHFAP logo projected on it.
Getting ready for the conference to start

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.  

Cultural Heritage Digitisation News

Title page of the "Complete Pocketbook or Gentleman's and Tradesman's daily journal for the year of our Lord 1830"

Last month I started working at the Cultural Heritage and Digitisation Service (CHDS) as a Digitisation Operator. Before joining the team, I was working on a large digitisation project at the National Collection of Aerial Photography (NCAP) where some of my colleagues were of the robotic variety, known as ‘Cobots’. Coincidentally, some of the team at the CHDS had met the Cobots as part of the Association for Historical and Fine Art Photography (AHFAP) conference last year.

News Projects

 

The Association for Historical and Fine Art Photogapher’s (AHFAP) conference is always a highlight of the year and, alongside 2and3D Photography at the Rijksmuseum and Archiving, it has become one of the must-attend events for any cultural heritage imaging professional. This year we were fortunate that AHFAP took place at the National Museum of Scotland here in Edinburgh, meaning for the first time ever the entire Cultural Heritage Digitisation team could attend! 

Library News

In February 2022, PhD students Vesna Curlic and Ash Charlton began their digitisation internships in partnership with the University of Edinburgh’s Library and University Collections and the Centre for Data, Culture, and Society. Together, they reflect on the joys and challenges of digitisation.

We were tasked with an internship project that has two main parts – half our time is spent in the Cultural Heritage Digitisation Service’s Digital Imaging Unit (DIU) in the University’s Main Library scanning early volumes of The Student, University of Edinburgh’s student newspaper. The other half of the time, we work to develop a training pathway for the Centre for Data, Culture and Society which will direct people towards resources for undertaking their own digitising projects. This post is part one of two, reflecting on our experiences digitising The Student.

Library News Projects

For the past eleven weeks I’ve had the opportunity to intern with the Digital Imaging Unit, working on a project to evaluate the potential of establishing a 3D digitisation service within the department. “3D digitisation” in this sense encompasses everything from the initial production of digital models – using suitable items from across the University Collections – to online display, preservation of 3D data, and 3D printing. The project was roughly organised into three phases: research, testing, and implementation.  

Although I worked primarily with Susan Pettigrew (Photographer, DIU) and Mike Boyd (uCreate Manager) I always felt supported by the other Library & University Collections staff; everyone I had the chance to speak to was eager to discuss their own work on top of contributing to the project. 

Cultural Heritage Digitisation Library News

Student browsing images of Library and University Collections on the Digital Wall

This past Winter 2019/20 the Digital Imaging Unit and Centre for Research Collections Museums teams hosted two student interns to support the development of the new Digital Wall, which opened in the University of Edinburgh’s main Library in September 2019. The students, Dario Lucarini (Napier University) and Tom Hutton (Edinburgh College of Art), were tasked with

Edinburgh College of Art Exhibitions Library News

The Digital Imaging Unit hosts the digitised content it has produced on a site called Image Collections. This site is available for searching, sharing, exporting, and reusing publically available and copyrighted images from the Library and University Collections. Many images have been used for research, teaching, publications and creating new content.

Need some images? Here are some tips for searching Image Collections.

  1. Site Overview

    The home page has a tiled look that will allow for you to jump straight into a collection of images (grouped by theme) to browse or to search across all collections using the search box at the top. If you click on a collection tile, it will take you to a collection overview page describing what you will find within that collection. Some collection pages have additional iiif manifest links so you can view an entire book as if reading through it, instead of looking at each page as an individual page. If you decide to browse that collection it will take you to a gallery style view of all the images in that collection. You can increase the number of images that appear at a time and page through to browse the entire collection. You can also use the navigation pane on the left side of the screen to filter based on specific characteristics, such as what, where, who and when.

  2. Searching Across Collections

    If you are looking for a specific search term, such as ‘student’, make sure to search across All Collections. Hover over the Collections tab on the top left of the page until

Library News