At the start of the project and in the midst of UK lockdown, we managed develop an at-home scanning workflow with our Digitisation Manager. This involved the physical pickup of slides from our archive in Printworks, safely couriered and dropped-off at a distance to their home. She was then able to scan slides using a backlight and DSLR setup, as demonstrated in the attached video. Although this method developed fantastic results, the process was much slower than originally planned, and we held off from purchasing any high-end equipment (which must be installed in our archive studio) until the end of the project when access to the office was more reliable due to loosening COVID-19 restrictions.

Scanning & Processing of 4,348 new images:
2079 New Slide Scans
2269 Public Submissions

Volunteer Led Metadata Renovation on 9,535 images updating keywords, captions and lexicon to reflect inclusive narratives. This incorporates:
316 The Rusty Pin - pin badge archive
1899 New Slide Scans
3683 Tristan O'Neill - UK Garage, Jungle, Drum n Bass
1368 Gavin Watson - Skins, Punks, Rave
2269 Public Submissions

Towards the end of the project we were able to purchase a Slidesnap Pro scanner which is capable of scanning 14,000 slide per 8 hour period. Due to limited access to the office our scanning process was limited to remote scanning methods, however now access to our office is being allowed 1 day per week, we expect to see a large number of scans to be carried out over the next few weeks post project completion.

Although due to circumstances we were unable to scan as many images as we had originally planned, the project helped us develop new methods of scanning and conserving youth culture history.

With the delivery of our new Slidesnap Pro, we are confident our entire slide archive will be fully digitised and backed up by the end of Spring 2020, ensuring our archive is secure and resilient and less reliant on physical space.