The National Library of Australia is undertaking the massive task of digitising over 12,000 glass plate negatives, taken between 1908 and the mid-1930s, which were donated to it last month. The Fairfax Archives Glass Plate Collection will be processed over the next 12 months and become an invaluable resource for researchers.
‘The National Library of Australia is a world leader in the digitisation field so we are well placed to embark on such a vast project,’ Nicola Mackay-Sim, Curator of Pictures at the National Library of Australia, told ArtsHub. ‘Probably one of the main issues is the time and the resources needed to digitise the many thousands of negatives in the Fairfax collection but we are fortunate to have received National Cultural Heritage funding to help with this. The preservation process is also key to this project. Even if we find broken glass negs we will be able to digitise them too – we can sandwich any broken neg between two sheets of glass before they’re digitised so that won’t be a problem.’
