How the city of Pulheim digitised their archives

Digitising the past: Pulheim’s 7,000 negatives and slides

November 2018. Horst Kandt, Head of the Pulheim City Archives, contacted MEDIAFIX. The Pulheim City Archives faced the challenge of digitising their entire collection of negatives – more than 7,000 items in total. In addition, hundreds of slides in a wide variety of formats also needed to be digitised.

The media held by the Pulheim City Archives largely came from private individuals and show community life in many different forms: public events, shooting festivals, choir rehearsals, football matches, archaeological finds, bowling clubs, private celebrations, pigeon exhibitions, golden wedding anniversary couples, animals and people at work. The images were taken in the 1960s and 1980s.

The challenge

Some of the original material showed significant defects: a large proportion of the negatives had suffered water damage. As a result, the media were almost destroyed.

In addition, many of the negative strips had been cut apart. This meant there were numerous individual negatives, each stored in a separate plastic sleeve.

An inspection of the material also revealed that some of the negatives contained nitro compounds, as older negative material had been used for the photographs. These nitro compounds posed a source of danger, as they can lead to spontaneous combustion over time.

The aim of the digitisation was therefore to archive and preserve the images in the long term, as well as to ensure safety by converting the partly self-igniting analogue material into digital form.

The solution

Holger Juraschek, Key Account Manager at MEDIAFIX, managed the digitisation project for the Pulheim City Archives.

First, the client-specific challenges were identified during a phone consultation. This was followed by individual advice on digitising the collection. In the next step, the analogue media from the Pulheim City Archives were collected by MEDIAFIX and safely transported to the MEDIAFIX headquarters.

Using technology developed in-house and MEDIAFIX’s own production facilities, the countless negatives and slides from the Pulheim City Archives were then digitised. Taking the client’s individual requirements into account was particularly important: all analogue archive media had to be converted into digital form, regardless of their condition, while using a predefined crop. MEDIAFIX staff therefore worked with media in a wide range of formats, some of which were severely damaged, cut apart, stored individually or even potentially self-igniting. For large parts of the water-damaged negatives, focusing had to be carried out manually by MEDIAFIX staff, as the serious defects in the original material made automatic focusing by the scanner impossible.

Despite the challenging conditions, the MEDIAFIX team succeeded, thanks to their many years of experience, in digitising even the heavily damaged negatives and slides in the highest quality. This meant that the Pulheim City Archives collection was successfully preserved for the future.

Client feedback

Archive Director Horst Kandt was delighted with the digitisation carried out by MEDIAFIX: “The coordination regarding the execution of the project was very good. During the consultation, Mr Juraschek asked me many questions, which led to a precisely defined order.”

Mr Kandt also described the completion time of the project as excellent: “Digitising our media required a great many work steps, as countless negatives were individual items and stored in separate sleeves. Each individual negative therefore had to be removed from its sleeve, as the media cannot be digitised through the sleeve. Due to the large number of negatives, this resulted in considerable staffing effort. Added to this was the effort required because of the sometimes very poor condition of the collection. Nevertheless, despite the high level of work involved, the digitisation of our collection was completed extremely quickly.”

The Archive Director also described the delivery and final explanation of how the project was carried out as “very good”.

Horst Kandt therefore draws a very positive conclusion: “Both the excellent result of the digitisation and the individual advice and support throughout the project were convincing.”