Waterford County Museum—world champions
Published in 20th-century / Contemporary History, Issue 3 (May/Jun 2006), News, Volume 14
Members of the Waterford County Museum Image Archive project team perusing a recently donated album of photographs (l to r)—image archivist Alan Healy, Museum president Willie Whelan, curator Willie Fraher and Déise Design software developer Martin Whelan. (Waterford County Museum)
The digital image archive constructed by Waterford County Museum has been awarded the Best Small Museum Web Site 2006 title at the prestigious Museums and the Web international conference held in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on 22–25 March 2006. The archive currently contains some 2500 historic photographs, sketches, postcards, paintings and drawings of County Waterford. The system has been designed to store tens of thousands of images. It is intended that approximately 2500 additional images will be added per annum. In order to find new material for the archive on an ongoing basis the museum has set up a history outreach programme. Already there are volunteer collectors in 10 villages around Waterford collecting photographs for the archive. Each image is scanned at a huge size and algorithms are then used to resize and watermark each image automatically for display online. A digital copy of the original image is stored in the archive; in the event of an image being destroyed or damaged the museum can reproduce the image from the digital copy. The archive can be viewed online at: www.waterfordcountyimages.org.
