The Effect of Digital Indexing Systems on the Accessibilityof Photographic Collections

This Digital Image Archive (DIA) project involves the production of adigital archive of a collection of Nineteenth Century photographicimages and equipment. The DIA was designed to operate as a public accesscatalogue, to aid curators with information retrieval and to reduce theneed to handle some original material. Much of the William Henry FoxTalbot collection at the Royal Photographic Society can no longer beexhibited due to damage caused by handling and light. Access to thecollection is restricted because of preservation concerns over a growingpercentage of the collection and insufficient resources forreproductions and supervision. These problems led to investigations intothe possible advantages that digital technology might offer.Cross-referencing, administrative cataloguing and recording ofpreservation techniques are ideally suited to digital technology. Theshort life span of digital storage media and concerns over systemcompatibility requires the development of a complex long-term digitalstrategy that must be standardized if the archival material is tosurvive. Construction of the DIA involved investigations into softwareand hardware configurations concentrating on the ability to customizefactors such as indexing from recognized standards and practices. Thispaper concentrates on the results of a survey into standards withindigital indexing systems, which indicates that although there is growingawareness of standardization within digital cataloguing and multimedia,many organizations continue to devise independent systems.