Help us preserve our photos
Many of the images in our Archives are beginning to suffer from age. The Digitisation Working group has been busy converting boxes of colour slides, packets of film negatives, and even some glass plates, into digital images. We have several hundred thousand images there, in many formats. At the last count there were close to 20 thousand images which had been scanned.
Currently we have a small team who individually spend a few hours, one day a week, working to preserve these images for the future, at our North Street Archive building in Ava. As well, we have two or three members working on their home computers scanning batches of images.
This is a time-consuming project, which needs many hands on the shovel! We would like to have more volunteers either at Ava for a few hours each week, or working at home with their own computers doing the scanning.
One of the biggest issues we have is that the majority of images have little or no information about them. No location, date or description of what is in the image. We need to gather that knowledge while we still can. If you think you can recognise and distill that sort of information from an image, we are setting up a procedure you can follow and send in the descriptions dates, types etc. See the ‘Image Identify’ post on the menu.
A scanned example
Image Number JB0900-24
Here is a photo about which we know next to nothing: “Three electric locomotives on a passenger train with a van at each end, crossing a river bridge next to a large hillside.” No date; no location; no info about the train. Where is it coming from and going to? What river is that? What bridge? Not even the class of the locos or the types of carriages is known.
Can you write an expanded description, Locomotive ID, Location, Date, Description etc.
If you can help on the project, please contact Graeme McClare at the Archive,
Phone or email to locoarchive@actrix.co.nz .
Role:- Editor
