The Digitisation Centre of Western Australia
About us
The Digitisation Centre of Western Australia is an important piece of research infrastructure that aims to digitise, to global archival standards, the major Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences collections held in Western Australia. This Centre emerges from an innovative collaboration between the Western Australian universities, the State Library of Western Australia and the Western Australian Museum. The collections that are being digitised are of national and international significance.
In 2023, our third year of operation, the Centre is fully operational and we are continuing the digitisation of our partners’ collections. The Centre also offers a fee-based digitisation service.
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 Digitisation Centre’s Audio Digitisation Suite is located at the State Library of Western Australia.The Audio Suite 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.
Our team
Meet the team behind the operations of the Digitisation Centre. They come with a range of unique skills and experiences in the industry.
- Chief Investigator: Professor Benjamin Smith, The University of Western Australia
- Chief Investigator: Professor Helena Grehan, Murdoch University
- Chief Investigator: Professor Jo McDonald, The University of Western Australia
- Chief Investigator: Professor Erik Champion, Curtin University
- Chief Investigator: Dr Toby Burrows, The University of Western Australia
- Chief Investigator: Associate Professor Michael Broderick, Murdoch University
- Chief Investigator: Professor Paul Arthur, Edith Cowan University
- Chief Investigator: Associate Professor Jonathon McIntosh, Edith Cowan University
- Coordinator (Digitisation Centre of WA)
Learn more
Unlocking Cultural Collections through Digitisation Webinar
Watch the webinar event above held by the Western Australian University Librarians (WAUL) on 11 December 2020 featuring the following four presentations:
- 'Introduction to the Digitisation Centre of WA' by Scott Nicholls, Associate University Librarian, Research and Collections (UWA)
- 'Using digital collections in research' by Professor Ben Smith, Associate Dean, Research (UWA)
- 'Collection prioritisation' by Peter Green, Associate Director, Collections, Systems & Infrastructure (Curtin University)
- 'Digital asset management' by Daniel Rozas Nunez, Manager Collection Care (SLWA)
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
Contact us
The Digitisation Centre of Western Australia