Friday, 21 December 2012
Tuesday, 4 December 2012
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)
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