Friday 19 October 2012

National Aerospace Library - Royal Aeronautical Society



The National Aerospace Library located in Farnborough holds  an extensive archive of material recording the evolution of Man's  attempts to conquer the dream of flight from prehistory to modern times, recording developments in aeronautics,  aviation, aircraft / aerospace technology and the civil and military operation of aircraft throughout the ages through its various collections.

American Air Museum - Roger A Freeman Photographic Archive


Roger A Freeman Photographic Collection

Roger A, Freeman was a noted aero-historian who’s specialist subject was the 8th Air Force operations during Word War II. He wrote what is considered the definitive popular history book entitled the ‘Mighty Eighth’ and contributed to many documentaries and films about the Eighth and even acted as technical adviser to David Putnam’s film Memphis Belle.


BUFVC - News on Screen Archive




The British Universities Film & Video Council (BUFVC) is a representative body, which promotes the production, study and use of moving image, sound and related media in higher education and research.  Their ‘News on Screen’ archive contains some 80,000 newsreel production documents from the likes of Gaumont, Pathe and British Paramount News, which formed the basis of twice-weekly news bulletins shown in cinemas up and down the land and were the primary news source for millions.  Max was asked to convert the archive into a searchable resource. 

The archive presented a particular challenge as it contained many duplicate images as a by-product of its creation over the years. We were able to identify these duplicates, not only "true" duplicates in computing terms, but also "lookalikes" such as photocopies which were almost indistinguishable to the human eye.


Image above by kind permission of British Universities Film and Video Council

KIngs College London - X-Ray Imaging of DNA Molecules


One of the most momentous discoveries of our era is of how the structure of hereditary material is comprised within every living organism’s cells. Francis Crick and James Watson proposed a structure for DNA in 1953 and their model was underpinned by the work conducted the previous three years beforehand at the Medical Research Council Biophysics Unit of King’s College London. The prime movers in obtaining the raw data for Crick and Watson to help formulate their momentous discovery were Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin. Wilkins and Franklin were responsible for refining x-Ray technology to a new level of clarity, resolution and sophistication in the newly formed Medical Research Council Biophysics Unit of King’s College in London.
Because of the very precious nature of these x-Ray Films Max was given the task of scanning them onsite at Kings College. The x-Ray images were originally captured on a wide range of film sizes ranging from small images right up to long rolls. The rolled images were scanned in stages and later joined together by our highly skilled image restoration experts.



Images above by Kind Permission of Kings College London

Corps of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers - Scrapbook


The Corps of Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME) is a corps of the British Army that has responsibility for the maintenance, servicing and inspection of almost every electrical and mechanical piece of equipment within the British Arm, ranging from Apache helicopters to dental tools and utensils. In fact after World War II REME was brought into assessing the possibility of starting up production of the Beetle car as transport for the occupying forces and this ultimately led to the formation of the VW Car Group!
A significant part of the fascinating history of corps is documented in a number of bound photographic albums at the REME Museum of Technology.
Max was commissioned to digitally photograph these precious albums and produce high-resolution copies of each individual picture within the album.
We are proud to be associated with this project and we have already provided the REME Museum with approximately 10,000 quality images from these fascinating albums.


Image above by Kind Permission of the REME Museum of Technology

Gigapixel Image Capture - Diamond Jubilee Portrait


For the official Diamond Jubilee Portrait of the Queen, the British based Australian artist Ralph Heimans created a large scale and life-sized painting. MAX was commissioned to create a Gigapixel image of the painting at a resolution that would reveal every intricate brushstroke.

 


Images above used by Kind Permission of Ralph Heimans

To create a digital copy of the painting we used a Hasselblad camera fitted with a Phase One camera back. However, even the most sophisticated medium format digital cameras are not capable of revealing all of the detail of such a large-scale work. We therefore shot twenty-eight individual pictures of sections of the painting, which we merged into one seamless image of over 1.5 GB in file size using the latest imaging technologies. To generate a prefect image we had to ensure that the lighting was consistent and that there was no glare from the highly glossy surface of the delicate oil painting.




LSE - Digitisation of the 'Beaver' newspaper


London School of Economics
‘The Beaver’ is the weekly newspaper of the London School of Economics Students Union at the LSE.
MAX Communications was commissioned to digitise all issues since 1949 when the newspaper was first produced.
The work involved colour balancing and sizing of each individual copy to be incorporated into ‘page turning software’. The work demanded full image consistency to capture the look, feel and content of each page. 

The archive of back issues is now a searchable resource and we were responsible for the full Optical Character Recognition of over 20,000 pages of text. The output of the OCR process involved production of PDF/A, full Tif images, text and XML files.

 


Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) - The South Polar Times


The Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)

The ‘South Polar Times’ was an in-house magazine, produced during the winters of 1902-3 to help keep moral high when the ship ‘Discovery’ was ice-bound. Robert Scott led the 1901-1904 expeditions and Ernest Shackleton edited the magazine.

Max Communications was commissioned to produce high quality digital photographs of the entire collection at the premises of the Royal Geographical Society. This included zoological diagrams, charts, maps and scientific accounts.





Images used with the kind permission of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)






Thursday 18 October 2012

Exhibition Printing for Bexley Heritage Trust


Recent examples of digitisation projects undertaken by MAX

Bexley Heritage Trust
The Bexley Heritage Trust recently unearthed a staggering 14,000‐glass lantern slides collected and captured by its former resident Arthur Boswell. These pictures were compiled throughout the course of Boswell’s lifetime from 1880 to 1966. Not only do they reveal pictures of the local Bexley area taken by Boswell, but Boswell also bought many international images from other collectors and lantern slide makers. These additional international images are very diverse and the locations range from the plains of Africa to the fjords of Norway and cities across Italy.
MAX was tasked with the digitisation of the glass slides and then the production of large format prints for the exhibition ‘Illuminated World’ hosted at Hall Place, a Grade 1 listed Tudor country house situated in Bexley.









Images by kind permission of Bexley Museum Collection


Monday 3 September 2012

MAX helps to delve into the history of the British Board of Longitude


 


The British Board of Longitude was created in 1714 and existed for more than a century. Back in the 1700s Longitude was incredibly difficult to find, hence the launch of the Board as directed by the British government. The idea was to invite solutions to this problem, and a prize of £20,000 – a huge amount of money at the time – was offered for this purpose.

The organisation would have a historic role in maritime history, which is why a joint research project is now underway into the 114 years of developments initiated by the Board. The Arts and Humanities Research Council has granted funding to support the project, undertaken by the National Maritime Museum and the University of Cambridge (the Department of History and Philosophy of Science).

MAX and the National Maritime Museum

MAX is proud to be able to play a key role in this project. The man who claimed the £20,000 prize offered by the British Board of Longitude was John Harrison. Those who are familiar with maritime history will no doubt recognise this name. John Harrison was born in 1693 and was 21 when the British Board of Longitude came into being. He began his work to find an accurate measure of longitude at sea in 1730, but would not win the prize until 1773, forty-three years later. He was only granted it then by an Act of Parliament.

Two years later at the age of 82, his seminal work on longitude, “A Description Concerning Such Mechanism”, was published. It was this very book, handwritten and presented in a tough leather case, which found its way into the hands of our employee Sam Rowland recently. Sam is responsible for digitising the book on behalf of the National Maritime Museum, an organisation we are proud to have a twelve year association with.

Sam was amazed when he realised what he had in his hands. “I removed the book from its tough leather case and began checking through, expecting to find printed text,” he said. “When I saw handwriting, the realisation of what I was holding in my hands was immense. It was John Harrison’s 230 year old hand written work ‘Such Mechanism’. I feel extremely privileged to be trusted with such a historic article.”

MAX Communications – provider of expert digitisation services

John Harrison’s book is clearly a fine tome and one we are proud to be working with. However it is not the only precious manuscript the team at MAX has seen. We can handle manuscripts that are centuries old in a sensitive and careful manner. We have a dedicated book scanner onsite, enabling us to handle large scale digitisation projects just as easily as small scale ones.

The National Maritime Museum is one of many clients to take advantage of our onsite scanning service and fully managed colour calibrated workflow. Please contact us today if you have a similar project you would like us to work on.

Friday 20 July 2012

MAX at Polesdon Lacey






The National Trust faces the challenge of connecting with visitors and potential visitors if it is to avoid the preconception of its places as dry or rather formal.
One of the ways of achieving these aims is to re-present a room within a property in order to create a more immersive and absorbing physical environment. In these selected rooms, visitors are invited to imagine themselves in a particular historic time and place. The curators and conservators carefully research into an actual story associated with a property and based on the detailed research the room is carefully arranged and filled with objects that have a high degree of historical accuracy. Taking this approach can significantly enhance the visitor experience and can encourage longer and more repeat visiting to a property.
MAX was delighted to be involved in a recent project at Polesdon Lacey to assist in a small part to re-create a historic event when King Edward VII came to Polesden Lacey to enjoy a six-course dinner party with his long-time mistress Alice Keppel.
The Trust has gone to great lengths to get everything just right, in March they took delivery of six meters of snowy white damask linen table cloth with an original Edwardian design. Ivan Day an external food consultant has also the last course or entremet served at the dinner party over 100 years ago. MAX was tasked with creation of a very accurate facsimile of the delicately and intricately designed menu.
One of MAX’s technicians visited the property and photographed the menu on a high resolution digital camera. The menu was the printed onto Fine Art Paper that matched the original and then cut out and lightly embossed to create an excellent facsimile of the original menu.


The Trust has also incorporated the digital version of the menu into an IPad app that will give the visitor access to additional content such as historical information on the people present at the dinner party and also detailed information about the food served.
 


Make sure you visit the beautiful house in June to see the amazing re-creation of the dinner party setting in all its atmospheric glory.

For additional information contact

National Trust Property Information
National Trust, Polesden Lacey House, Dorking, Surrey RH5 6BD
Victoria Nutt
House and Collections Manager - Polesden Lacey
01372 455071 (ddi) | 01372 452048 (main tel) | 01372 452023 (main fax)