About

Welcome to the Morrab Library Photographic Archive catalogue.

We are currently digitising our photographs and attaching them to their catalogue entries. As we continue to scan photos, more of the entries here will contain digital images.

Our digitisation project is being undertaken in a number of phases.

First is to capture each print or negative with an archival scan. This is a high resolution, high bit-depth scan of the photograph in TIFF format, including all edges, and saved, unaltered, to the database. This is called the scan master. These are the images that you can see on the catalogue today.

Once we have scanned all photos, we will then embark upon a second phase - to make digital copies of all images which we will then edit: crop, adjust lighting, orientation, and repair major blemishes. This is what we call the edit master.

The third phase of the project is to improve the descriptions in our catalogues. Technically, this is known as metadata enhancement and is vital, as this will help people to search and discover items in our collections.

Rather than wait for several more years until we have edited our images, we are placing JPEG copies of the unedited masters with the catalogue as it stands today so that people can begin to enjoy the collection and see what we have. We will update it periodically with recently scanned images and any changes to the descriptions in the database.

If you have any queries, please contact the Morrab Library Photographic Archive.