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scanner glass negatives GTJ website Zoomify

The Llandrindod Portraits Project - Technical

Image and Data Capture

To scan the glass negatives used on this website Lloyd Lewis used an Epson 2450 photo scanner from Culturenet Cymru. Each negative was carefully laid on the glass bed of the scanner, scanned and checked for image quality. He used a custom made mask to hold the negatives a fraction of a millimetre above the glass. This helped to prevent damage to the sensitive emulsion on the negatives and also prevented coloured interference patterns (Newton's rings), which sometimes occur when two glass surfaces meet.

The scanner settings were carefully manipulated so that the maximum tonal information and image detail were recorded from the negatives. The scans were saved as archival master TIFF's in un-compressed PC format and burned to CD. A copy of each CD was sent to Culturenet Cymru for image checking. Each image was checked for detail, rotation, skew, crop and tonal range by experienced staff who had previously worked on the Gathering the Jewels project.

A database of information about each negative was also created and updated by Lloyd. The fields in the database were based on the Dublin Core standard. This made it easy to import the metadata into an existing Gathering the Jewels database, which also uses Dublin Core as the standard for descriptive metadata.

Imaging conforms to the Gathering the Jewels standard. See http://www.gtj.org.uk/about/aboutDigitise.php?lang=en

Descriptive metadata conforms to the Dublin Core framework, as implemented in the Gathering the Jewels project, but with some modifications to allow for community involvement. See http://www.gtj.org.uk/about/aboutMetadata.php?lang=en

Technical metadata conforms to the RLG Preservation metadata standard as implemented in the Gathering the Jewels project.



 

The Website

Introduction

The brief for the website was that it should display the 2000 Llandrindod portraits in a clear and easily navigable way, and that there should be a facility allowing users to provide more information about the images. The Gathering the Jewels website already has all this functionality, so we took that model and modified it for the Communities Cymru site.

Website features include:

  1. Categories. On the front page are 17 categories ("babies", "military groups" etc). These categories divide the images into manageable chunks and allow easy browsing of the site.
  2. Search function. On the left hand side of every page is a search function. This searches the title, description and subject fields of every image. This is useful if the user knows what he is looking for, a name or an address for example.
  3. Zoomify. This is a flash-based image feature. It allows the user to view images at a very high detail while keeping file size and (therefore) download time to a minimum. All the images on this site have been "zoomfied". Because zoomify uses Flash it will not work with all browsers on all computer platforms.
  4. Web form. The web form (below each image) provides a means of collecting feedback/more information about each image. None of the fields in the web form are compulsory so users can provide as little or as much information as they wish. The form updates a database of information and emails a staff member at Culturenet Cymru (feedback@culturenetcymru.com) who will edit and collate the feedback before publishing it onto the site.

Specification

The website is hosted on a Windows 2000 Server operating system that runs Microsoft IIS (Internet Information Services). The web application is PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) and the back end database is MS SQL, this database holds the data and image information.

Standards

The website confirms to WAI accessibility level AA. There is more information about this in the accessibility page (link at the bottom of every page).

The Partners

Read about the Llandridnod project partners:

How we did it


CulturenetCymru