Pilot digitisation - HEDS

25 November 2008: I delivered two test albums to the Higher Education Digitisation Service at the University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, last week. The visit gave me the opportunity to inspect their facilities, including security arrangements, in order that a suitable service level agreement be drawn up between King’s College and HEDS. The visit highlighted two possible approaches to scanning of multi-asset albums - in this case a photograph album, each page of which contains between 4-8 images. The first entailed scanning the whole page at 300 dpi, before high resolution scanning by HEDS of those component images already selected by Archives staff as being of potential interest to academics. The second approach involves the high resolution scan of a whole page. Subsequent selection and publication of component images would take place in the Archives when necessary, on demand. Each approach has potential advantages and drawbacks which the test will highlight.