BOB O'HARA

Archival researcher

Bulk Digital Imaging

We are digital imaging specialists

Many National Archives documents are fragile and can be difficult to read, slowing down transcription time. Also parchment documents cannot be photocopied, whereas they can be filmed.

With the advent of digital photography we are able to offer a copying service that is far cheaper than traditional methods such as photocopying or transcription. Clients just pay for our time and the digital images are part of the package. Because of this new technology, many clients prefer an 'inclusive' approach whereby the researcher is given a much broader mandate and cover-to-cover files can be copied quickly and economically.

See below for details about digital file delivery.

Hints for using We Transfer or Hightail for file transfers from Bob O'Hara

We use We Transfer or Hightail to store large files online, ready for our clients to download.

Most of the image files we send to clients are too large to be attached to emails (unless only one or two images are required) so we send them to our account on We Transfer or Hightail and our client is then notified that the file is ready for download.

This has the advantage of allowing clients to download at a time convenient to them.

Once your images are ready we will upload them to We Transfer or Hightail which will trigger an email being sent automatically to you.

The images are sent in Zip format (so we can send them as one file). The images are NOT compressed in this process and are still at the same resolution as they were when taken by our digital camera. You will need a Zip program to extract them to a folder on your hard disk. If you don't have a zip program see the web for free or shareware programs such as 7Zip, CuteZip etc.

We zip the images into meaningful folder names. It is suggested you create a folder on your hard disk with the same name and extract the files into that folder, so you will easily be able to find them later.

To view the images you can use any picture viewing program but for really great control over your images you might like to look at programmes like the free Picasa from Google. Picasa allows you, among its many advanced benefits, to add comments or keywords to images, so that you can find images later simply by typing in the keyword. Obviously the potential for adding detailed descriptions of the contents of an image is not lost on serious researchers. Go to Picasa, and read the information there.

Please note that files are automatically deleted from We Transfer or Hightail after fourteen days, whether you have downloaded them or not. If you miss collecting your file, please let us know and we will send it again.

Should you have any questions before or during using these file transfer systems, please don't hesitate to ask. We have chosen this method of file delivery, after many tests, as the most efficient and immediate way of delivering your valuable research material to you as quickly and painlessly as possible. We expect it to work well for you, as it has for many clients who already use it.

Thanks to Patricia Brimeyer, USA, who was an earlier adopter of our digital services and graceously helped us through the development phase.