Have you ever wondered how long it takes Volunteers working on the Town Hall Photographer's Collection to scan a negative to archive quality and then add the date, department and subject information to the image file's metadata?
Well...it takes 30 seconds to set up, preview and adjust the scanner histogram settings for each negative, then approximately three minutes for the scanner to scan the negative at 300 dpi / enlarge the image to A3 and finally save the resultant file as a TIFF.
The metadata, taken from the Town Hall Photographer's Negatives Book, is then typed in during the three minutes scanning time of the following negative...but some Volunteers use two scanners at once!
This photograph is of Robert Robinson, a long term Volunteeer on the project, scanning in the 20,000th negative from the Town Hall Photographer's Collection - GB127.M850.
The Town Hall Photographer’s Collection is a large photographic collection held in Manchester City Council’s Central Library archives, ranging in date from 1956 to 2007.
The collection consists of tens of thousands of images, covering the varied areas of work of Manchester Corporation and latterly, Manchester City Council.
The photographs were taken by staff photographers, who were tasked to document the work of Corporation/Council departments and, in doing so, captured many aspects of Manchester life and history, including significant changes to the Manchester landscape.
The collection includes many different formats from glass negatives, to slides, prints, CDs and even a couple of cine films.
What is especially exciting is that the majority of these images have never before been available in a digital format and therefore have only ever been seen by a handful of people.
A team of dedicated Staff and Volunteers are currently working on the systematic digitisation of the negatives held within the collection.
This album represents the result of their work to date.
