The Digitisation Centre of Western Australia

Facilities and Equipment

The Digitisation Centre was made possible by a $1,100,000 Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities Grant from the Australian Research Council and $425,000 in cash contributions by the five Western Australian Universities, the State Library of Western Australia and the Western Australian Museum. In addition there has been a massive ‘in-kind’ contribution of time and expertise by staff at all participating institutions.

The University of Western Australia donated a large laboratory room and paid for the custom refurbishment of this room to accommodate the bulk of the equipment of the Centre. The State Library of Western Australia donated a custom-built sound studio and helped to repurpose this for the needs of the Centre. Thanks to this extraordinary support from all those involved, the Digitisation Centre has been able to purchase a comprehensive range of world-class archival standard digitisation equipment and to install these in custom-designed archival digitisation facilities.

Facilities

Digitisation Centre Room

The Digitisation Centre is located at the University of Western Australia’s Crawley campus, on Level 2 of the Barry J Marshall Library. 

Dispatch Room

The Centre features a secure room on the ground level of the Barry J Marshall Library which is especially fitted for receiving collections and preparing them for digitisation.

Audio Studio

The Centre’s Audio Studio is located at the State Library of Western Australia in the Perth Cultural Centre, Northbridge.

2D scanning

Digital Transitions Versa

The DT Versa is a complete digitization platform. The stand, camera, and column seamlessly integrate with our software for fast and easy preservation-grade digitization of bound materials, manuscripts, flat artwork, maps, plans and photographs.

Digital Transitions Atom

The DT Atom is a smaller platform that functions similarly to the DT Versa and is used by the DCWA to digitise transmissive items such as slides and negatives to the required archival preservation standards.

Kodak Alaris i4250

A powerful batch document scanner for high-volume capture, the Kodak Alaris is capable of handling an average of up to 30,000 pages per day and can scan a mixture of documents of different sizes and thicknesses, including fragile documents. It has sensitive built-in technology to avoid document damage and excellent OCR read rates for more precise data extraction with no loss of scanning speed.

Audio

The Audio Studio has the capacity to read all major analogue audio formats, including reel-to-reel, vinyl, cassettes and multiple other tape formats, and to ingest these to archival standards in digital format.

QUADRIGA Audio

QUADRIGA Audio is the solution for the digitisation of a variety of media types, transferring single carrier sound archives into digital mass storage systems, with a strong emphasis on audio quality and metadata accuracy. It allows capture from analogue compact-cassette recorders, analogue tape machines, Digital Audio Tapes, record players, and other machines.

Audiovisual

Lasergraphics ScanStation 6.5K

The ScanStation is specially designed for archival film scanning. It offers up to 6.5K resolution, scanning speeds of up to 60 fps, and handles multiple film gauges including 8mm, Super 8mm, 16mm, Super 16mm, and 35mm. The ScanStation reads optical soundtracks at any frame rate and outputs the sound with correct pitch and in sync with the picture. 

Other features include severely warped film handling, multiple concurrent file outputs, HDR for colour and B&W film, Automatic Failed Splice Recovery, and best-in-class image stabilisation.

QUADRIGA Video

QUADRIGA Video is a migration workstation designed for the quality-controlled transfer of video tapes into archive files on a large scale. It supports simultaneous, parallel capturing from video playback machines and supports the conversion of VHS, S-VHS, Betamax, Betacam, VHS-C, U-matic, DV, and Mini DV.

Partners

The Digitisation Centre of Western Australia is a collaboration between the Western Australian universities, the Western Australian Museum and the State Library of Western Australia.

The Digitisation Centre of Western Australia is an Australian Research Council funded project: LE200100123

Our team

The Digitisation Centre is run and managed by three entities: DCWA Governance Board, DCWA Steering Committee and the digitisation team.

1. DCWA Governance Board
   The DCWA Governance Board is responsible for the strategic management and utilisation of the DCWA.
2. DCWA Steering Committee
   The Steering Committee comprises of members from all project partner organisations. The Committee is responsible for overseeing the infrastructure and operations of DCWA. The DCWA coordinator meets with the committee regularly to discuss priorities, key changes and goals for the coming projects.
   
   Current membership (2023/2024):
   

   Chair, University of Western Australia	Professor Benjamin Smith
   Curtin University	A/Professor Susanna Castleden
   Edith Cowan University	Professor Paul Arthur
   Murdoch University	Professor Helena Grehan
   WA Museum	Mr Evan Rogers
   WA State Library	Ms Sophie Farrar
   Curtin University Library	Mr David Wells
   ECU Library	Ms Constance Wiebrands
   Murdoch Library	Ms Claire Fletcher
   University of Notre Dame Library	Mr Stephen McVey
   UWA Library	Mr Scott Nicholls
   Co-opted Member	Assoc Professor Andrew Woods
   DCWA Coordinator	Ms Janet Luk
   Executive Officer (UWA)	Ms Debra Paisley

3. DCWA Digitisation Team

The digitisation team are the staff behind the daily operations of the Digitisation Centre. Each member brings distinctive skills that allow DCWA to run efficiently, maintain international standards in digitisation, and build relationships with collection custodians. Currently five digitisation officers are working in the DCWA facilities in UWA and the State Library of WA.