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.
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:
The Cultural Heritage Digitisation Service (CHDS) has managed the Main Library’s Digital Wall since it was installed in late 2019.1 The Wall is made up of two sets of nine 4k screens which are operated by touch screens: users can navigate high resolution images of the library’s cultural heritage collections as well as watch videos that feature specific collection items, projects and pieces of work undertaken by library staff. When the Wall is not in use, it displays massive “Attractor” videos which run across all 18 screens, designed to draw users in.
I was delighted to take on the challenge of helping photograph the University’s collection of notebooks of geologist Sir Charles Lyell, and there’s a bit more to photographing 300 notebooks than one might imagine. The Cultural Heritage Digitisation Service is a fantastic team of people, and quickly welcomed me onboard. Prior to this posting, I’ve enjoyed a varied background, including photographing the contents of National Trust for Scotland castles as part of a major digitisation project Reveal, plus Polar and Northern Lights photography aboard expedition cruise ships.
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
