Balochistan Archives

Ongoing Projects

Digitization in an Archival Environment

Cultural institutions such as museums, libraries, archives, and historical societies house remarkable collections of cultural artifacts. It is the responsibility of the staff working for those institutions to preserve, protect and provide responsible stewardship for the materials, and to the best of their ability, provide continued long-term access (Russell)

Advances in technology allow institutions to provide expanded access and education; however, there are important priorities that must be addressed prior to embarking on a digital conversion project.

Digitization in an archival environment includes taking a physical object or analog item, such as manuscripts, a map, or correspondence, from a collection that is rare or unique, often extremely fragile, and taking photographs of the item, and transferring the photographs to a digital medium. The negatives or prints are scanned into digital format such as TIFF (Tagged Image File Format).

Balochistan Archives has taken the step to provide a large number of users’ access to unique or special collections’ material that may be the most attractive feature of digital conversion projects.

Currently the Digital preservation Lab of Balochistan Archives is scanning the Agent to Governor General (AGG) records to provide access and “publicize” the material to researchers, other departments and peers, and to demonstrate the importance of the collections.

Digitization process on flatbed scanner

Some of the most commonly used machines in the Digitization Centre are flatbed scanners (Epson expression 12000 xl). These scanners are typically used for photographs and documents that are Large-format scanning up to 12.2" x 17.2"

Professional large-format scanning

The flatbed scanners are one of the preferred machines because they produce some of the best quality images (most images are scanned at 300- 600 PPI – pixels per inch). Even extremely tiny objects, such as tiny cards with writing, can be scanned for excellent quality.

Scanning with SilverFast

As a kind of assistant, it guides the user in the correct order through all processing steps required for his individual workflow. The user interface of SilverFast 8 is newly developed by current standards, for the user can operate all major functions quickly and easily. SilverFast 8 supports the latest 64bit hardware and is therefore extremely fast and efficient.

The Digital Preservation Lab

The Digital Preservation Lab was established in 2015 to serve as the production and research hub for the researchers and the digital preservation program.