Why Digitise

The photographs exhibited in Contested Histories are reproductions of the originals, and are the result of a collaboration between the Antiquities Museum and The University of Queensland Library’s Fryer Library and Digitisation section. As most of Iliffe’s archive is unpublished, both the digitisation process and the research underpinning this exhibition not only introduces this material and its context to the public for the first time, but also ensures that Iliffe’s photographs are preserved for the future.

In this exhibition, the digitisation process involved both scanning all photographs on a specialist colour-corrected scanner using image capture specifications developed by the National Library of Australia, and high-resolution photography. Project staff from the Antiquities Museum completed extensive research to identify and contextualise photographs in the archive. The resulting digital images and metadata are stored on the University of Queensland’s institutional repository, UQ eSpace, making the archive fully accessible and searchable for researchers around the world.

The photographs displayed in the exhibition were printed onto self-adhesive vinyl using a high-resolution printer, then mounted onto a rigid foam-board. This process provides excellent image reproduction quality while ensuring that the original prints, which are between 70 and 90 years old, remain safe in their archival albums at the Fryer Library’s climate-controlled storage facilities.