Digitisation Lab

Exploring the "how" of digitisation.

Naming files and folders for digitisation

Naming files and folders is a fundamental part of managing any sort of digital data and yet 90% of people who come to use our scanners don’t have a naming schema for their image files. This post explores how I arrived at the file naming schemas used by the University Digitisation Centre (UDC) for digitisation workflows and how and why these often differ from typical research data management training.

A clever file naming schema on its own
does not constitute data management

Continue reading “Naming files and folders for digitisation” →

Cooking with DOS: Reading metadata

Having discovered how simple it is to write metadata to a file it’s now time to look at how this metadata can be reused by other people and applications. Continue reading “Cooking with DOS: Reading metadata” →

Cooking with DOS: Writing metadata

Embedding metadata into digitised files is a 3 stage process… collecting metadata, preparing it and then writing it into the files. In this post I’ll just be looking at different methods for the last step so that you can’t use the excuse that it’s too difficult to do. In later posts I’ll expand on this and look at how embedding metadata can be seamlessly included into a digitisation workflow. Continue reading “Cooking with DOS: Writing metadata” →

Cooking with DOS: Converting Images to PDF

Do you scan documents with your camera? In this post we’ll whip up some Imagemagick scripts to not only convert folders of images to PDFs but also apply a range of image processing similar to that used business document scanners at the same time. Continue reading “Cooking with DOS: Converting Images to PDF” →

Serra Explorer v2 RC is here!

Serra Explorer is a proof of concept tool that demonstrates how metadata from a library catalogue can be collected and re-purposed using an iPhone or iPad. If your library catalogue is driven by Sierra, feel free to download this and have a play. Continue reading “Serra Explorer v2 RC is here!” →

Just Get It!

Forgot your USB and need some way to transfer your scans from our scanners? Can’t edit your images because you don’t have Photoshop and can’t afford the monthly license fee? Too often we see people with problems that they just shouldn’t (and don’t) have. This post looks at some of the free/affordable stuff that people want to use but don’t know that they can get it. Continue reading “Just Get It!” →

What resolution should I scan at?

So you need to get some images scanned but your confused by different people giving you different numbers for DPI? Don’t Panic Immediately! Figuring out what resolution to scan at is a lot easier than many people think… you just have to do some simple math. Continue reading “What resolution should I scan at?” →

Cooking with DOS

The Windows command line scares most people but if you want to automate stuff then command line scripts can be your best friend. In this series of posts I’ll be taking you through many of the processes involved with digitisation and looking at how they can be performed with freely available utilities. Continue reading “Cooking with DOS” →

Google Earth Overlays

Google Earth can display online images as an overlay above the satellite imagery without requiring any special server software. There are only a few requirements:

High resolution images must be tiled to be displayed at their full resolution
A Keyhole Markup Language (KML) file containing the positioning information and url of the image(s)
e.g. the KML file for a map of Melbourne (1855).

Continue reading “Google Earth Overlays” →

Lift off!

After years of tossing around plans to share more of the technical bits behind the scenes at the University Digitisation Centre of the University of Melbourne Library I’ve finally bitten the bullet and started a blog. Continue reading “Lift off!” →