Background
Bloomsbury Publishing is a leading independent publishing house established in 1986. It has companies in London, New York, Sydney and Delhi. Its four divisions include: Bloomsbury Academic and Professional Division; Bloomsbury Information; Bloomsbury Adult Publishing; Bloomsbury Children's Publishing.
The Challenge
Fashion Photography Archive (FPA)
Bloomsbury Publishing invited proposals for the supply of digitisation services for the archive of the fashion photographer Niall McInerney (the Fashion Photography Archive, or FPA). The FPA comprises Niall McInerney's work across some thirty years, and covers catwalk shows, street style, and behind-the-scenes shots. All major designers and fashion houses from the second half of the twentieth century are covered, and the archive includes photographs of shows in all of the major cities in Western Europe and North America.
The majority of the material is held on approximately 750,000 mounted 35mm positive photography slides, with a small proportion as either un-mounted single images or film rolls.
Size of Project:
Total Images: 750,000 (Approx). On-going project
Period: 3 Years
Client's website:
www.bloomsbury.com
The Solution
Transmedia undertook this project over a 3 year period. We collected all material using our secure GPS tracked vehicles and store this in our high security, temperature and humidity controlled archive, whilst work is in progress. We digitise approximately 20,000 35mm photography slides per month, 24bit Colour, supplied as lossless Tiff (High Quality) and Jpeg images for use online.
Bloomsbury provide Transmedia with a spreadsheet listing designers which match up to the slides. We update this spreadsheet if we can find out more information from the slides themselves. The spreadsheet is then linked to each individual image.
Backups are stored at Transmedia on LTO-4 Backup media for long term storage.
Images will be available on the Bloomsbury Fashion Central website through a paid subscription. For further details, please visit: www.bloomsburyfashioncentral.com
