Most of the material we handle belongs to a society, a parish, a small museum or a family — collections of a few thousand items, held by people who know them well and have no budget for a scanning suite.
We collect, digitise, catalogue and return. The originals come back in the order they left in, boxed as we found them, with a written condition note for anything that was already damaged. The files come back on media you can read without us.
Minute books, registers, deeds, correspondence. Bound material is captured on a book cradle — nothing is cut from its binding.
Prints, glass plates, film negatives and lantern slides, scanned as transmissive originals rather than photographed.
Roll film and fiche, including the reels that nobody has been able to read since the last reader broke.
Item-level description to a schema you already use, or a simple spreadsheet if you do not use one. We would rather produce something you can maintain.
We are not a bulk scanning bureau. A job here is typically 500 to 20,000 images, handled by one person from collection to return.
With a look at the material. For anything beyond a couple of boxes we visit, go through it with whoever knows it, and write a short proposal: what is there, what it would cost to capture, what order it should be done in, and what we would leave alone.
That proposal is free and it is yours. Several collections have used ours to apply for funding and then done the work themselves, which is a perfectly good outcome.