Cultural heritage digitisation plays an important role in increasing the visibility and accessibility of cultural heritage collections. The Digitisation Centre of Western Australia supports this mission by preserving these valuable materials in high-quality digital formats, ensuring they are kept for future generations.
What is Cultural Heritage Digitisation?
According to the International Federation of Library Associations, identifying and restoring historical information and cultural values embedded is essential to forming and strengthening our national identities. Therefore, the preservation of cultural heritage is vital to ensure that both current and future generations can have access to these collections and learn from them.
In today’s digital age, many organisations still hold valuable physical collections that need to be preserved. However, it is not easy for cultural institutions in Western Australia to safeguard these collections. The high costs involved with digitisation, risks of transporting materials interstate, and the possibility of materials deteriorating or becoming obsolete, are among some of the challenges that exists within the digitisation space, making collections inaccessible and at risk of being lost forever. This is where cultural heritage digitisation comes in, allowing collection owners to maintain and preserve their collections for a long period of time.
Digitisation Centre of Western Australia (DCWA) is Western Australia’s first digitisation centre that provides services for long-term preservation of archival collections. By partnering with all five universities, local museums, and the State Library of WA, DCWA is helping to digitise various formats, including paper-based documents, photographs, audio recordings, and audio-visual materials.
Image: Photo of the Subiaco Football Club in 1913. Image supplied by the Subiaco Museum. (Accession number: 2022.114).
Why Digitise Your Collections?
Digitisation involves converting information stored in physical or analogue formats into digital formats that can be stored, shared, and accessed using modern digital devices. By digitising collections, collection owners can enhance accessibility beyond those who physically visit them.
One of the key benefits of digitisation is the ability to share the digitised cultural heritage collections online for various purposes including research, education and public enjoyment. To fully realise this benefit, collecting institutions will need to invest in management systems that provide archival storage and access points.
What Does Cultural Heritage Digitisation Involve and How Is It Done in WA?
Cultural heritage digitisation involves the process of digital documentation, research, as well as presentation and visualisation. Beyond scanning of physical paper records, cultural heritage digitisation can also take the forms of remote sensing, photogrammetry/image modelling, 3D laser scanning, and infrared/multi-spectral image exploration.
Currently, DCWA provides photography service to capture 2D paper-based and photographic materials, re-formats analog audio-visual recordings real-time and extracts data from optical media disks. The Centre's digitisation workflow adheres to national and international standards to ensure the digital files are an authentic copy of physical items and analog content for archival purposes. At the end of the digitisation process, the Centre provides archival master files for preservation and creates access files that are suitable for viewing, sharing and meeting project needs.
Managing Digitised Collections & Ensuring Accessibility
After the items have been digitised, DCWA will return collection items and transfer the digital files to collection custodians via external hard drives or cloud-based platforms, and the access of the digital collections are managed by the collection custodians. Many local governments and small organisations have leveraged Collections WA to showcase their collections online.
Collections WA is a free, searchable platform that displays collections from libraries, galleries, museums, archives, historical societies across WA. Designed as a central database, Collections WA allows records to be published online at no cost to build connections and help current and future generations gain a better understanding of WA’s intricate history.
The main objective of cultural heritage digitisation through Collections WA is to provide a platform that facilitates communication between cultural, academic sectors, and society at large. This allows institutions and experts in digital technology, archaeology, museology, library, history, architecture, and other related fields to exchange ideas and promote research.
Digitising for Subiaco Museum
Subiaco Museum has been working with DCWA since late 2022. Digitisation of their photograph collection has allowed museum staff to conduct research and promote their collections online.
One notable collection includes a series of photographs showcasing various architectural styles of houses in Subiaco, including historical civic buildings and shops that no longer exist in present day. Digitising these photographs presents the local significance with the changes in the streetscape. Other materials digitised included family albums dating from the early 1900 to 1950s. They are invaluable in telling the stories of life in the City of Subiaco during that time. Below is a photo belonging to Mr Thomas "Shirley" White, a former Mayor and Councillor of Subiaco from the early 1900s to the 1920s. White was a prominent businessman who played a vital role in Subiaco’s development. These digitised photographs are now safely archived, with digital files accessible through Collections WA.
Image: A photo from the White Album. Image supplied by the Subiaco Museum. (Accession number: 2022.140).
“Having a local digitisation centre has been wonderful. The convenience of having a centre just around the corner means that the oversized and fragile items we have been getting digitised don’t have to travel via courier or post. Outsourcing digitisation has saved many staff hours and allowed us to complete other projects or work on editing other records while the items are offsite.
“We are a small museum and small team and don’t have the capacity to digitise the oversized and fragile photographs onsite. With the DCWA just around the corner we can drop off small batches at a time to be digitised,” said Coordinator of Museum Services at Subiaco Museum, Jessica Marantelli.
Albany’s Historic Whaling Station Logbook
Apart the Subiaco Museum, Albany's Historic Whaling Station has also engaged DCWA to digitise a nationally significant logbook documenting Australia’s maritime history and economic ties to Norway.
“Access to the Digitisation Centre of WA is invaluable for our collection. We’re at the beginning of our digitisation process and having the ability to professionally digitise vulnerable archival items, such as the logbooks, using state of the art equipment here in WA means we can go straight to the best option. Without DCWA, we would be limited to scanning our paper-based archives,” said Denyse MacNish, Collections and Projects at the organisation.
Image: Cover of Toren’s logbook. Image supplied by the Albany’s Historic Whaling Station. (Accession number: BAV.2023.2.001).
The digitised logbook will be featured in an upcoming exhibit about the Cheynes whaling ship’s journey from Norway to Australia, including images of some pages and a possible touch-screen display or QR code linking to Collections WA.
For more information about the facilities and services at the DCWA, please visit our website: Digitisation Centre of Western Australia.
To explore more collections from Albany’s Historic Whaling Station, go to: https://collectionswa.net.au/organisations/albanys-historic-whaling-station.
To learn more about the Subiaco Museum collections, go to: https://collectionswa.net.au/organisations/subiaco-museum.
This article is part of the celebration of the International Archives Week 2025. This year's theme is 'Archives Are Accessible – Archives for Everyone'. Please visit this website for more information about Intrernational Archives Day and events around the world: https://www.ica.org/international-archives-week/iaw-news/.