Transforming a glass negative collection into a digital asset through collaborative effort

Abstract

The Hughes Company Glass Negatives Collection is one of the many notable image collections held by Special Collections at the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. In an effort to provide public access to this set of large-format glass negatives, Special Collections and the Bibliographic and Metadata Services units worked in collaboration on an in-house project to digitise, describe and serve the images and metadata to the public via a digital content management system. The project utilised existing staff with some additional hiring of student workers and required three years to complete. This paper describes the collection, the digitisation process and the creation of the metadata records representing the images.