Guidelines - Digitisation of photographic materials
01.06.2011
The Dutch program Images for the Future (Beelden voor de Toekomst) started in 2007.
A special budget of € 154 million was made available by the government over a period of
7 years to safeguard the Netherlands’ endangered photographic and audiovisual heritage.
In total, 137,200 hours of video, 22,510 hours of film, 123,900 hours of audio and 2.9 million
photographs in the collections of the Netherlands institute for Sound and Vision, EYE Film
Institute Netherlands (formerly known as Foundation Netherlands Filmmuseum) en the
Nationaal Archief (the Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands) are to be restored, conserved,
digitised and made accessible to the public.
As part of the European tender procedure for the digitisation of photographic materials, the
consortium partners compiled a desciptive document. The Nationaal Archief has many years of
experience in high-quality microfilming and in the digital transfer of archive materials, which has
proven invaluable in formulating these guidelines and for creating the technical specifications
used in the tender document.
The guidelines drawn up by the Nationaal Archief correspond mainly with those compiled for
preservation scanning in the Dutch national program Metamorfoze, which focuses on the
preservation of paper heritage. The most important difference is the fact that the Nationaal
Archief guidelines are specifically suited to the digitisation of photographs and negatives.
For example, the process of converting a negative into a positive image is defined in considerable
detail. In addition, the reference charts with known characteristics (so called ‘test targets’) are
suitable for different photographic formats. Resolutions are set in accordance with the original
image’s format. For practical reasons, the OECF parameters have been relaxed and test targets
are not provided for each individual digital image. Last but not least, the Nationaal Archief has
adopted a meaningful file naming system. The consortium partners created special software to
enable the checking of test scans by both the digitisation contractor and the principal.
The guidelines presented in this publication are an abridged version of the full technical
specifications included in the tender document. They summarise the most essential components
of the digitisation process for photographic materials. To help assess the tenders submitted,
a more extensive set of criteria has been compiled. Also a number of questions have been
formulated in order to evaluate the tenderer’s know-how and quality. For the sake of clarity
those chapters have been omitted from this document.