The Archaeological Museum Frankfurt had almost 10,000 medium-format negatives digitised by the MEDIAFIX scanning service, with the aim of safeguarding its analogue photographic heritage and preserving it for future generations. Tessa Maletschek, Head of Collections at the museum, emphasises the importance of digitising analogue images: “The material doesn’t improve with age, so the time had come to have the negatives digitised.”
The importance of digitisation
The negatives show exhibits and exhibition rooms. Most of them are believed to date back to the 1960s. Digitisation allows the museum to document historical changes to the objects. Some objects have even disappeared, meaning the old negatives are the only remaining evidence. Comparative images also provide essential information when restoring objects. “For us as a museum, it is historically interesting to see how objects change over time. In the case of some metal objects, in individual cases you can see significant changes over the years. We can only recognise this if we have the old images available for comparison,” explains Ms Maletschek.
The digitisation process
During a personal consultation with Ms Maletschek, MEDIAFIX first identified the specific challenges involved in digitising the collection. The analogue media were then collected and safely transported to MEDIAFIX headquarters. Holger Juraschek, Key Account Manager at MEDIAFIX, managed the digitisation order. “We didn’t just digitise the negatives from the Archaeological Museum; we also cleaned them beforehand and digitally processed them afterwards. We placed particular importance on transferring all of the museum’s analogue media into digital form, regardless of their condition, while taking individual requirements into account,” explains Mr Juraschek.
In order to convert negatives to digital, specific knowledge and expertise are required to ensure that the digitised files retain the quality and accuracy of the original media. Tessa Maletschek explains that, for a museum, digitising these materials in-house is a complex task. “Back in 2011, we had already started digitising glass photographic plates ourselves. Even then, we realised that the material deteriorates over the years. At the time, there were only around 1,600 plates, which we were still able to digitise ourselves. But we understood that the digitisation process takes a great deal of time.”
The challenge
When MEDIAFIX processed the media, several particular challenges had to be taken into account. As expected, the museum had stored the media appropriately. However, over the years it had not been possible to prevent fading or age-related colour changes. Some of the original images had also been photographed overexposed or out of focus, making manual adjustments to the digitisation equipment necessary.
In addition, the work required particular care, as the images depicted art and historical objects, explains Holger Juraschek: “As a company specialising in digitisation for private customers as well as businesses and museums, we digitise a wide range of source materials. In most cases, however, old images feature people or landscapes. That was not the case here.” As the digitisation operators are not experts in art or historical objects, correctly identifying mirroring, rotation and colours in the images from the Archaeological Museum was an additional challenge. “Over the course of the digitisation, we therefore had to learn what colours, for example, a historical mosaic should have or which way up an ancient coin should be,” says Mr Juraschek.
Inventory and archiving
Digitising museum archives is not only a technical challenge, but also requires careful planning and organisation. Before digitisation, the original media had to be catalogued and inventoried to ensure that every object was recorded and correctly assigned. After digitisation, the digital files were also inventoried and archived so that they can be easily accessed in future. “The image files are now linked to our collection database, so that every member of staff with access to the database also has access to the scanned medium-format negatives,” explains Tessa Maletschek.
Overall, the digitisation of negatives and other analogue media shows how important technology and innovation are for the preservation and sharing of cultural heritage. Collaboration between museums and digitisation companies such as MEDIAFIX makes it possible to protect historical materials for the future and make them accessible to the public.
Photo of the museum: Andreas Praefcke
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