Conservation treatment to remove metal pins, ensuring the text is readable for digitisation.
Our Conservation for Imaging team are responsible for all conservation elements of our mass digitisation programme at The National Archives, ensuring the care and preservation of documents is maintained throughout the digitisation process.
We are involved in all aspects of the project lifecycle. During the initial planning stages we undertake condition surveys, providing advice on the condition of the collection, its suitability for imaging and the possible conservation treatments that will be needed. Our decision-making informs workflow plans and project lifecycles.
Once projects are approved, we adopt a minimal approach to conservation: conserving any damage that poses a risk to the document during handling or that affects access and legibility. We also provide bespoke handling training and support for all the in house and third-party imaging teams.
The Conservation for Imaging team work simultaneously across multiple different digitisation projects, with involvement from the planning stages to final delivery.
Licencing and publishing projects
Working with our Licensing Department, we support multiple publishing partner projects and their large-scale tender programme.
Our key partners in our mass digitisation programme are academic and family history publishers.
Our academic partner projects are often highly curated projects that include content from across multiple series pertaining to a specific topic. Our academic partners include:
Our family history partners generally want more name-rich collections that will allow people to search an individual’s history. Our family history partners include:
Digitisation department
We work collaboratively with our Digitisation Department to support the imaging of our documents at The National Archives on request from commercial and academic partners. This includes supporting the digitisation of:
- The National Farm Survey
- One million images consisting of material related to the Arabian Gulf for The Arabian Gulf Digital Archive (AGDA) online platform.
Academic research funded projects
Our team is responsible for providing conservation support to any large scale academic research funded digitisation projects.
The Prize Papers
One of our large scale academic research projects is the Prize Papers project, which is a collaborative digitisation project between The National Archives and Oldenburg University. This is a vast collection of seized papers and goods from enemy ships captured by the British in wartime between the mid-seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries.
The aim is to sort and prepare for imaging approximately 100,000 largely unused and unsorted personal and business correspondence from 1652-1815. A core aim of the project is to conserve and preserve the materiality authenticity of the collection. As such, recording written and visual documentation of our conservation practice in preparing these documents for digitisation is a central element of our conservation approach.
Find out more about the Prize Papers project on the official prizepapers website and in our blogs.
Bundles of paper stitched together in a large volume. The Prize Papers collection contains thousands of unique and complex documents, including sealed letters, textiles and seals.