Preserving 40 years of photographs

More than four decades worth of photographs published by the Taranaki Daily News are about to be loaded on to a ship bound for North America. It is all part of a project involving all Fairfax New Zealand newspapers that will see their old photographs digitally copied and put into electronic archives. Meanwhile, the original photographs will be stored for up to 10 years before being offered back to individual newspapers. For the past few weeks Daily News librarian and archivist Deb Gould and volunteer archivist Graeme Lea have been busy packaging up as many as 100,000 photographs in preparation for their big journey. "It's been a big project," Mrs Gould said yesterday. "The photographs we hold in our library are primarily those published from the early 1970s through to the time our photography went digital in about 2008." The company doing the digitising will create digital images of each photograph in very quick time, and the results of the project are expected back in New Zealand within weeks, she said. "That's stage one of the project. Stage two will then involve sending the company all of the photographic negatives we hold, many of which go back much further than the 1970s. There's thousands of them, too." The shipment of old photographs will head off in the middle of this month. - © Fairfax NZ News http://www.stuff.co.nz/taranaki-daily-news/news/8621717/Preserving-40-years-of-photographs ROB MAETZIG Last updated 05:00 02/05/2013