 Right, well welcome everyone and thank you for coming. So I'm going to talk this afternoon about the Hutt City Council archives and the project to digitise the minute books and correspondence that were the result of a fire at the Potoni Barra Council in 1985 which is about 30 years ago. So I thought first I'll give you a brief introduction to the Hutt City Council archives and then some background to the fire. Before I talk to you about the process that we went through and then there'll be five to ten minutes at the end for questions. So this is the Hutt City Council archives. We hold about 2,700 linear metres of text-based archives and about 260 draws of maps and plans. We have a storeroom which meets the Archives New Zealand storage standard and a public reading room. And as well there are four full-time staff who work at the archives and we spend our time answering over 1,000 enquiries a year, scanning 700 archives each year, mostly building property files and doing arrangement and description. And the archives date from the 1870s to the 1990s and they also include the predecessor boroughs of the area that's Potoni, Lower Hutt and Eastbourne and as well the Hutt County Council files and they were all amalgamated in 1989. So on January 3, 1985, a fire broke out in the Potoni-Burra Council building here in Potoni. It was thieves had broken into the council's strong room and stolen money from the SAFE and then set fire to the room and unfortunately that the strong room was where all the Potoni-Burra Council records were kept. And this is an image of the strong room and you can see the SAFE on the right there and you can see the mess that was caused by the fire. And there's another view here of the actual damage. And these photographs are from the evening post-collection of the Alexander Turnbull Library. So there are a total of 90 minute books and approximately 250 full-scap boxes of burnt and water-damaged material. The minute books were wrapped in white paper as you can see here and they were covered in a fine layer of soot and fragments of pages. The spines were either non-existent or so tight from the swelling of the pages that you could only open them 25%. They were inaccessible and there was a real risk of losing text that documented the decisions of council. In 2005, a project to microfilm the burnt material was proposed. However, the cost of conservation to allow for the SAFE handling during microfilming was in the range of 5,000 to 6,000 per book. Needless to say, that project came to a halt. In 2012, let me just get to the next slide, with the advance of digital scanning and technology and storage options, I approached Joy Curly from Triptych and Cheryl Fahey from New Zealand Micrographic Services about digitising this material and what it would involve in terms of handling and therefore the amount of conservation work we needed to do. And this is Andy Fenton, director of New Zealand Micrographic Services, examining one of the minute books. And this is just another image showing you the amount of border we had around the text that we could break away if needed be, because the pages were so brittle. So in the end there were six factors that I considered before going ahead with digitisation. The first was, what was my purpose for doing this? The life expectancy of the books and correspondence had been greatly reduced by the fire damage and water damage. And the amount of acidic dust, and acidic sort I should say, and dust. So my purpose for digitising was to create a preservation master and an access copy. It's an important question, the why, because it's going to affect the format you scan to and it will also affect your storage requirements. An uncompressed tiff for your digital preservation master for example is 60 megabytes. Per page, and there are 115 to 370 tiffs per book. That's 6.9 gigabytes to 22.2 gigabytes. The second factor was handling. With digitisation you only have to handle the page once to get it in the right position for capture. The software will crop and rotate the image. And this greatly reduces the level of conservation that's required. And as a result the costs were reduced by a fifth for the conservation treatment. The third consideration was technology for scanning. There was a book cradle or camera setup which gave us the option to leave volumes of spines in a reasonable condition bound. The other factors include the storage of images, backups and large volumes of data. The council's IT department set up a separate document store on their servers so storage could be managed long term. As well they have a program of regular backup and storage in geographically different areas so that covered that issue. The legibility of text that had been damaged by water and fire was greatly increased with digitisation. And the ability to capture text and colour meant an authentic image of the archive could be created. As well the variable condition of the books could be managed. And the last factor was the cost of digitisation which turned out to be cheaper than the other options. So once I decided to go ahead with digitising it was then a matter of deciding to what level or what the criteria of conservation was going to be. So Joy came and viewed the minute books for us and they were a priority obviously. And we decided that the criteria for conservation work on the books would be to disbind the books that had weak spines and in danger of snapping when opened. To repair pages only to the level that enabled a page to be handed for scanning and to clean a page to enable the creation of a clear image. The books would then be put away in a custom made box for good. Joy selected the worst volumes, there were 19 in total and wrote a report of recommendations on disbinding, repairs and handling each book for scanning. And this is an image of, the next three slides are examples of the minute books and their condition before we conserved them. So you can see they're surrounded with bits and you can see this one the extent of damage of the fire on the covers and this one you can see the pressure on the binding with the swelling of the pages through water damage. Inside the books you can see the pages are fragile around the edges and the indexes you can see on the right they've melted and the leaves are cracking down the spine and there is some water and staining discoloration. And this is just another page, this one got a bit more charred and there's an amount of text here which has been obscured by the soot. So with this minute book the spine had come away and the covers were loose but it had its sewing structure intact so we were able to keep that and that's another image of the sewing structure and then on top of that we Joy made these beautiful boxes because now we had all these separated leaves or not in this case but in most of them it was important that we had a way of mechanically binding them all together so we couldn't lose anything. And then that was the box that went to New Zealand Micrographic Services and she'd often put a note at the top to give some special handling requirements or anything like that which was a real bonus. This is just another box where the covers were so bad that we had them sealed in plastic bags and we just kept them in the bottom of the box and they were not scanned. So instead of scanning those we just put target pages in to say that the reason why there was no spine or cover and that was adequate. And I'll talk a bit more about the target pages later. And this just shows some of the repair work that was done on the pages. Be careful not to obscure any text or anything like that for the scanning process. We had one issue when these crystals were discovered in one book and everything had to come to a halt while we got those tested at Callahan Innovation and they turned it to be gypsum. They still recommended various precautions around handling these books like you must have it in a well ventilated area and have some eye protection and a mask just in case. We also had to seal off the burnt archives that we were holding just in case there was a health hazard so that held us up a little bit. Now I want to move on to the digitisation process. And as I mentioned earlier there were two capture setups for creating digital images. For the volumes where the pages were not so brittle a book cradle and scanner with a trilinear array was used for capture. And here the book is placed on a cradle that brings the book up to a glass plate and gently puts some pressure on it just to hold the pages flat enough for scanning. For volumes that were more brittle these were photographed using a digital camera. This meant the book could sit close by and the page handed over a short distance and smoothly from right to left to prevent further damage. And also you can set up the camera so there is space around the page that you can then place it once and then use the image software to crop it. The camera's raw files were then converted to uncompressed TIFFs. The standards followed for creating digital preservation masters were the FADG standard which is the Federal Agency's digitisation guidelines initiative and the NARA technical guidelines and the Quality Index for Microfilming which was used for the font. And this just shows you the image parameters for the preservation masters. So the format was uncompressed TIFFs, colour space RGB, the bit depth 24 and the resolution 300 ppi 1 to 1. It's worth noting here that when digitising burnt material you are dealing with a number of extra steps. You need to take your time of handling the pages. You need to use mylar sheets to support the page especially when you're dealing with very fragile pages or paper fingers to separate pages. You need to check the images throughout the capture process to ensure each image meets the standards. This is especially important with a very fragile burnt material as there might not be a second chance to capture. For pages with contrasting sections such as a washed out text and a charred bottom to the page, a second exposure of the same page may need to be taken. Target pages need to be inserted for any anomalies and the capture area needs to be kept clean of debris and sticky soot so smudging and causing further damage and so to prevent smudging and causing further damage to the book. Cheryl was telling me that cloths were only used once when they were discarded. Clean dry hands, no gloves were also a requirement and maintaining fresh air because of the aroma. Being prepared to test and trial different methods was important too. I just want to show you, these are some images, these are some of the tips that were created of the minute books. We did double pages and this is with 24-bit depth and the file size of this tip is 57 megabytes. This is a close-up, I think, as I zoomed in 200% and that's the clarity of the image, which is fantastic. That's the PDF and once again zooming in 200% that's the clarity, it's still very clear. The PDFs, I think we split them into two so that they were more easy to download for the public via the internet and I think the PDF came to 600 megabytes. Next one. This is just an example of a minute book which had a lot of water damage to it and once we could take a tiff of it and zoom in and we can actually decipher what the text is behind that water damage so that was really useful. This is the book cradle scanner that was used for the majority of volumes and this photograph actually shows whether it was a microfilm camera but in our case we used another camera. So the volumes went on this book cradle which then came up to the glass there which gently applied that pressure to hold the pages flat. Now this is the camera setup for capturing the very fragile minute books. Now this particular book was so fragile it couldn't be handled by the conservator but using this setup we could take an image before the page was moved and text lost, check it and check that it had been created to the standards. This is a slide of a scanner she's just testing that she can actually lift the page the page will separate away and then here you can see the position of the book close to the capture area on the right and then and so there's only a short distance to move each page across onto the capture area and just notice all the burnt fragments which are hanging around and at risk of causing smudging and loss of detail and text and things like that. And this slide just shows the positioning of the page using a film strip and you can see on the left how the pages have been collated and also is just the amount of curl in those pages. One more and that's just a close-up and you might not be able to see but underneath that is a miler sheet which has been used to lift that page into position. So New Zealand Micrographic Services did a lot of testing and research on the best way to capture these burnt pages. Their research on work still being undertaken on materials burnt in the great London fire of London and on military records in the USA to assist in the capture in the end. They also tested infrared filters but there was no gain here either. In the end they found handling and the digitisation method was the key to capturing a good quality image in particular having a capture set up like a book cradle or camera using paper fingers to separate pages and a miler sheet to support those pages keeping the capture area clean to stop smudging or debris causing further damage to the book always having clean dry hands no gloves and placing the books close to the capture area so the pages only needed to move a short distance placed once in the image taken and that's the image of the very fragile minute book that I showed you before. Now we were very consistent with putting in or we put target pages in the start of every minute book so the target pages were the first one had the title and then our archive reference and then we had a target page for the process that was undertaken and then one about the scanning process so people could be clear about how we went about this project and then we had a technical information target page so people could see the types of the technical equipment we were using and the specs we were digitising to and there was an access target page as well so where everything's kept where the originals are kept so the correspondence so for the Betoni Bara Council's correspondence I adopted a different process and focused on creating access copies Diana Coop from Diana Coop Conservation came and worked on site to conserve and digitise the material and we are still working on the first 30 boxes of correspondence this is some of the issues she had to deal with so she had crumpled pages birdchard edges near to text washed out text and rips and tears and of course staples and this is just a tiff of one of the pages and then a close up so that's credited with a photocopier and that tiff is about 50 megabytes and a resolution of 300 ppi another example was this tiff which was captured on a photocopier and the file size is 30 megabytes half the size of the camera tiff however the amount of data captured by the photocopier is a bit for our needs and I haven't been brave enough yet to call it a digital preservation master because we don't have a regular programme of calibration or testing of our equipment until we do that then at the moment I'm just calling them access copies so there are other reasons for using a photocopier we found that the size of these pages were A5 to A4 and to get a clear resolution across the page the pages were loose and not so difficult to handle as the bound minute books and their value is not as great as the minute books so summing up so I want to say using digitisation to create preservation masters and access copies of the Patoni Borough Council's burnt minute books and correspondence has been a great success for the Hutt City Council archives it has enabled us to produce images at a size obscured text legible it has enabled us to produce a preservation master image and an access copy to capture contextual elements such as the text colour and page format enabling us to create an authentic image to provide an affordable solution for the Hutt City Council archives through saving costs on conservation and to capture books that were so fragile that they couldn't be handled for conservation an image could be taken before the page was moved and text lost and it has enabled us to make this material accessible not only to the people who come to our reading room but also to people around the world so and I just want to say a special thank you one was to my boss who allowed me to go ahead of this project and gave me the funding for it, that's Chris Goumay and to Droy Cooley and Stephen Williams to Cheryl Spooley-Fahey and Andy Fenton at New Zealand Micrographic Services and who could advise on the ways to conserve this material as well as produce the most wonderful, oh so that's Droy who at New Zealand Micrographic Services whose knowledge and networks in the heritage sector meant they could advise us on the best options for scanning and to Diana Coop from Diana Coop Conservation with her expertise in paper archives so thank you many questions, yes thank you for a great presentation and a good work done when you were talking about the course of the fire you said some thieves broke into the strong room and then stole some money and I was wondering when you showed the picture was it some form of old currency that you are keeping as a kaiva material or currency in use like the ones we keep in the bank that you were keeping in the archive and also when you were talking about cost you said that you found the digitisation process to be cheaper than other options which other options did you consider that you found more expensive than the digitisation process so we considered microfilming and the digitisation cost has come below that now so we do consider microfilming that was the only other option yes one minute book we probably lost chunks of it and we actually have kept it and it's bits but that's also, oh we've got two more sorry, a lie, we've got two more to do and we probably will lose those just warning you any other questions? ok, thank you very much