High resolution digital image storage at the National Railway Museum

This paper describes a project which is currently in progress, to make accessible, through electronic means, the 750,000 images in the photographic archive at the National Railway Museum (NRM). The circumstances surrounding the present storage and use of the photographs is described, together with the case for electronic storage. At the outset it was felt that electronic methods would have advantages over the present manual systems, and that in any case it would not be practical to use the existing methods for a significantly greater number of photographs. The paper reviews the available image storage technologies, and describes why a high resolution digital system was chosen. The operation of the system is described.