More about the rescue

Newspapers

The Battye Library holds the most complete collection of Western Australian newspapers in the world. There are 971 separate newspaper titles...

Films from the State Film Archive

The State Film Archives, the only regional film archive in Australia, contains over 3,000 titles in film and videotapes. It is a collection of unique historic and contemporary films...

The Rescue

The purpose of this section is to provide the community with further information about the HRRC project in relation to the actual rescue of significant historical records...

The Rescue

Photographic Negatives

The Battye Library's Pictorial Collection of nearly 1,000,000 images covers social and industrial history from all corners of the State, for example, from far north cattle stations to the early days of whaling in Albany, Aboriginal people and missions, the opening up of the goldfields, agriculture, architecture, group settlements, and postwar migration to more contemporary issues. The material dates from 1845 to the present day and contains some of the earliest known images of Western Australia.

The Pictorial Collection is the most complex of all the collections and the one with the greatest problems from a preservation and access point of view. Preservation surveys have been completed for the photographic negative collection which is the most vulnerable of the formats containing as it does images on glass plates, and nitrate and acetate film stock. It was found that nitrate and acetate negatives are in critical state. Deterioration has commenced giving the negatives a death sentence. If reformatting does not occur, many thousands of images will be lost.

It is proposed to reformat the most at risk negatives of the greatest research value selected from the 500,000 negatives that exist, and the backing up of the digital images with metadata details (information about the digitising of the images) to ensure their availability for all time. This will enable the linking of a selection of the images to the State Library's online catalogue to be available to anyone with access to the Internet. The images could be printed from the catalogue for personal and business research and for use in educational institutions at all levels of education. An important part of Western Australia's heritage and culture will be rescued and saved for future generations in an electronic format.

The State Library had 11,591,612 hits on its website in 2003-2004 and 2,858,525 searches on its database. Many of these hits and searches could translate into potential users of online photographs.