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.

Online Version of ‘The Beaver’

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)

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.

The Illuminated World exhibition at Hall Place

Images by kind permission of Bexley Museum Collection