Fremantle
· FamilyHistoryWA · genealogy · archiving · digitisation ·
Interesting article in the most recent Western Ancestor (the magazine of FamilyHistoryWA), about a project to get the Langley Collection digitized and stored in the FHWA's Electronic Document Depository.
Each file was labelled, and there was so much material. Letters by researchers from decades ago, photos, certificates, death notices, newspaper clippings and more. All well arranged.
Finally, I wrote a cover page to the whole project, saying who had compiled the research, permissions, copyright details and other information. John was then given a USB with the scanned files.
At this point we had learnt a lot about how to prepare for scanning, the process, and bookmarking, but we had another learning curve when it came to file sizes. Neil has a computer with so much power that he could probably run NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre. John couldn’t open the files! His computer didn’t have the power to manage such a big searchable PDF. Neil divided the whole database into smaller sections and John was then able to access the files. This is something we will have to bear in mind for future digitisation projects.
The final version of the project ended up with two files of 1,534 MB (2,352 pages) and 637 MB (914 pages) which John was able to read on his computer. We didn’t record how much time was spent preparing the files to scan but it was substantial. The actual scanning and file preparation took 27 hours.
I'm not quite sure that massive individual PDFs would be my first choice for this sort of thing.
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