Images of past getting new digital life

Women at work at Hallensteins’ factory, Chinese children lined in a solemn row, a settler family at rest by a felled tree, prospectors carrying their lives on their backs. These are some of the extraordinary scenes being digitised for the first time at the Hocken Library. Reporter Simon Henderson meets some of the people preserving the history of the region.

Human stories of work, rest and play are emerging from a cache of about 6000 glass plate negatives and lantern slides dating from about the 1890s to the 1940s.

This slice of life is part of the Hocken Library’s archives collection, and it is gradually being digitised by reprographic operator Richard Munro.

The collection included glass lantern slides which were about 8cm by 8cm and had a positive image developed on to the glass, he said.

"It is pretty much the predecessor of a slide projector."

People would gather for "magic lantern" shows to see images projected on a screen.

The collection also housed glass plates which had a negative image and ranged in sizes up to about 20cm by 30cm.

Those predated photographic film and were able to capture scenes in extraordinary detail.

"They are very delicate, but they are just so beautiful."

Digitising the collection was a time-consuming process.

After being moved from a climate and temperature-controlled archive room, the plates took 24 hours to acclimatise before they could be captured using a lightbox and a high-quality digital camera.

Handling the slides was fraught with potential problems as the image was only a thin layer of chemicals bound to the glass.

"You can actually see the emulsion peeling off the glass; you can see the image just flaking apart," Mr Munro said.

After digital capture it was up to archivists Tom Riley and David Murray to add as much detail as they could find about each image.

Mr Murray said the images were from several sources including the Otago Harbour Board, the New Zealand Alpine Club, Hallensteins, the former D.I.C. department store and Coulls Somerville Wilkie, which was later merged into Whitcombe and Tombs to form bookstore Whitcoulls.

Others included the Dunedin Photographic Society and North East Valley Normal School.

The images  sometimes had little information  with them, so the archivists were doing what they could to add to the information, including posting some on social media to ask members of the public if they could shed some light.

"They say every photo tells a story, but every photo tells more than one story," Mr Murray said.

Researcher services manager Lynn Benson said it was a fantastic collection.

"We want to over the ensuing years make sure that we have digitised all of our negatives."

The library was hoping to do a complete relaunch of their online searchable system.

This would replace the Hocken Snapshop site which launched in 2010 and held about 30,000 images but was a one-off project.

Instead the revamped site would enable items to be added on a regular basis as they were digitised.

"We hope to be launching that next year," Ms Benson said.