About this blog

 Join our discussions about this exciting project to digitise 3,500 glass plate negatives documenting the 1870s gold rush era in New South Wales and Victoria.

The Holtermann Collection is an internationally significant collection of prints, albums and glass plate negatives, including the largest hand coated wet plate negatives ever made. The Holtermann collection depicts New South Wales and Victorian gold towns from 1872 to 1875, and the streets and buildings of Sydney and Melbourne between 1871 and 1876.

The rich detail captured by the wet-plate negatives records every shop, house and mine in the surveyed areas. Images from the collection are currently available on the Library website, but they do not do justice to the original glass plates. They were batched scanned from 2nd generation 35mm film copies several years ago, losing much of the fine detail in the process.

Through the collaborative support of many generous benefactors, the Library has begun the Holtermann Collection Digitisation Project. This project will enable the cleaning, conservation and improved rehousing and protection of the fragile glass plates. Each glass-plate negative will be re-scanned to produce high resolution digital images. As new digital images are created, you will be able to enjoy enhanced and improved access to the images through our website, the catalogues and the Discover Collections.

In this blog we will be discussing the various stages of the project - preservation, digitisation (how do you manage a 1.6 x 0.9 m wet plate negative?), as well as looking at the rich content of the images.

We welcome your feedback, comments and questions.

About the team

Scott Wajon, Coordinator, Imaging Services

Scott Wajon has been working with the photographic collections of the State Library of NSW since 1989.  After spending a decade working in science, he started at the Library initially as a darkroom assistant, producing black and white prints from many of the Library's extensive negative collections.  Scott is currently the Coordinator of Imaging Services and has been involved with all aspects of the Library's digitisation programs since their inception

 Lang Ngo, Senior Conservator, Collection Preservation and Storage

Lang Ngo graduated from the University of Canberra in 1999 with a Bachelor of Applied Science in the Conservation of Cultural Materials specialising in paper conservation. Lang has previously worked at the State Library of Victoria and the Adelaide City Archives before taking up a position in 2001 at the State Library of New South Wales. She is currently a Senior Conservator in the Collection Preservation and Storage branch. Lang's most recent projects include the internal exhibitions Darwin Downunder, Bondi Jitterbug as well as Heritage Collection 2008.

For the Holtermann project Lang will be coordinating the preservation and rehousing of the Holtermann negatives with a team of assistant conservators.  Each negative will cleaned and rehoused in archival quality folders and boxes in preparation for the digitisation process. 

Alan Davies, Curator of Photographs, Original Materials

Alan is the Library's first Curator of Photographs. He previously worked at the University of Sydney for a decade, where in his spare time he read the Sydney Morning Herald for the 19th century (that took 7 years), wrote a  history of 19th century Australian Photography, won a Churchill Fellowship to examine Australian photographs in British institutions and travelled NSW looking at photographs during the Bicentenary. He's been here for 20 years and has written another 5 books and numerous catalogues on aspects of photographic history and photographers.

Lauren O'Brien, Digitisation Officer, Imaging Services

Lauren's experience working with historical glass plate negatives comes from her work over the last 18 months as a digitiser with the Justice and Police Museum on their Forensic Photography Collections. She has also worked in photographic production for seven years previous to beginning her work with the museum in all facets ranging from film development and photographic printing to scanning, digital retouching and copy work. Her main role will be to use the new Creo iQsmart3 scanner to create high quality archival master files from each plate in the collection.