The Archival Photo Database Project Outline

On September 15, 1997, the National Aviation Museum (NAM) launched a special New Media project to expand its resources on the Internet. The project involved the creation of a SchoolNet Digital Collections website which offers an overview of Canadian aviation history. It also allowed the museum to create an image database of its extensive collection of archival photographs, soon to be accessible from the Internet. This project was enabled through the museum's partnership with the Youth Services Bureau of Ottawa-Carleton (YSB) and Industry Canada (SchoolNet Digital Collections).

Industry Canada provided NAM with a budget which employed a team of four youths for a period of fifteen weeks under the condition that the team would provide SchoolNet Digital Collections with this website. YSB provided office space for the project and supervised the team of youths while helping them acquire sufficient work experience and computer training for future employment.

The National Aviation Museum's library possesses an archive of over 85,000 historical photographs. For the Archival Photo Database, this photo collection was sorted to include pictures of aircraft which were Canadian-manufactured, Canadian-designed or Canadian-used, and photographs of aircraft which are displayed at the museum. This sorting method reduced the Archival Photo Database collection to approximately 8,000 images.

Each archival photograph is pasted on a card which contains descriptive information about the subject on the photograph. To protect the photograph cards from loss or damage, the cards were photocopied before they were removed from the museum’s library and transported to the Youth Services Bureau for digitization.

The Youth Services Bureau in Orleans used its boardroom as a temporary workstation for NAM's Archival Photo Database project. This room was equipped with three networked computers, each running Windows 95, and equipped with a colour or B&W scanner.

Once the archival photograph cards were brought to YSB, they were scanned at low resolution (100 dpi), suitable for screen display. Using Adobe PhotoShop 4, the scanned images were cropped in order to isolate the photographs from the cards and then saved as TIF files. The large TIF files were later compressed into smaller JPEG images, as well as BMP thumbnails which were later inserted as reference photographs into database forms.

The database forms for the Archival Photo Database were created in Microsoft Access 97. These forms contained fields such as image identification number, image source, angle of view, location of photograph, photographer, date photographed, etc. A thumbnail of the corresponding photograph was inserted in a small window on top of every form.

In order to ensure the database information and thousands of digital images were stored safely, regular backups of the files were brought to NAM and stored on the museum’s network server. Once all the component database and image files were merged together, they were also saved on CD-ROM.

Throughout the development of this website, the youth team at YSB learned to use FrontPage 98 and to design graphics in PhotoShop. With the help of the National Aviation Museum's technical support staff, the team of youth workers are currently developing applications for a website which will enable on-line users to access and search through the Archival Photo Database.

Team Photograph (at the Youth Services Bureau, Orleans)
Clarel Vérriere, Mike Hall, Pierre Lamy