Digitalisation



The Society has accomplished an enormous amount of work over the last twenty five years, for example journal articles, collections of photographs, documents and personal memories.

None of this however yet enjoys the advantages possible when photographs and documents are converted into electronic digital form. These advantages include:

- ready, searchable access
- easy and low cost reproduction and dissemination eg using the internet
- safe (reduced space) storage plus the conservation of the original source materials, which no longer   have to be consulted directly
- easy incorporation in future research and publications/electronic media

We are now making a start with the digitalization process by scanning and storing the Society’s existing archive of photographic images. Each image has to be given a unique identifying number consisting of twelve digits. This is created as follows:

Digit Information  
1st Geographic location  
       a
     b
     f
     i
     l
     m
     n
     s
    w
     x 		Ascott
Bruern
Fifield
Idbury
Leafield
Milton
Lyneham
Shipton
somewhere in the Wychwoods
other
2nd First digit of year  
3rd Second digit of year  
4th Third digit of year  
5th Fourth digit of year  
6th Date refining letter  
        a
      v
      x
      u		 accurate
+/- five years
+/- ten years
uncertain
7th Main content  
       a
     b
     g
     i
     l
     p
     t		 artefacts
buildings
agriculture
industry
landscape
people
transport
8th First digit of number  
9th Second digit of number  
10th Third digit of number  
11th Fourth digit of number  
12th Addition of letter p indicates is a further processed image ie has been taken from a known copy or is the result of further processing from another scanned image  

A twelve digit number could look somewhat unwieldy but it does have the advantage of making simple searches possible without using a complicated date base eg merely by looking down the directory of image files. However a more sophisticated data base is also needed and we have decided to use an Excel spreadsheet for this. This will contain the following fields for each image:

1st The twelve digit unique number
2nd Any previous number
3rd Identity of the recorder of the information
4th Owner of the original
5th Copyright owner
6th Format used for digitizing
7th Title
8th Source of Information
9th Disclaimer obtained for further use
10th Information on reverse
11th Other notes


We are putting up on this site the first scanned images as a trial. They are arranged by location (please click on the links where available in the table above then click on thumbnails for larger photograph). It is hoped that visitors to the site will not only be interested in the images for themselves but will be prompted to inform us of any inaccuracies or additional information they may have. An even greater hope is that it might lead to the Society being loaned other historical images of the Wychwoods to incorporate in the archives.