Equipment

The Centre is housed in a wing of the Elmwood Building, part of the School of Natural and Built Environment, that was developed for our specific needs and requirements. In addition to a number of staff offices, we have a large digitisation laboratory and several smaller rooms housing specific digitisation equipment. We work in a controlled, secure environment, and are able to protect irreplaceable items through, for example, the use of a large Fire Safe.

Unusually for a Humanities-based unit, we have acquired a range of high-value, specialised hardware that it would be impossible to purchase under a normal Research Council grant. For example, some of our book page scanners cost in excess of £40,000. We are well placed, therefore, to reduce the costs of collaborative grant applications by avoiding the need to include, and justify the inclusion, of high-value equipment in an application.

We can convert almost any analogue object into a digital form – from an individual single-page manuscript, to bulk scanning maps, to the 3D imaging of buildings! We are an expert is assessing the processes required for each project we work on. This might include the painstaking scanning of a work of art with high-resolution imaging and careful colour control to bulk scanning printed documents processing millions of pages in a month.

The key to our success is assessing the requirements of each project, using the correct hardware to complete the digitisation process, and deciding on the most appropriate data capture techniques.