What we've worked on in May 2026
Last month, we worked on multiple exciting projects, including Dartington Hall Trust, Unilever, and The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo. We have worked with a range of different materials, from film slides to beautiful drawings and art pieces.
I’m especially excited to share the different types of material we have from The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo, as we have some amazing items that we rarely scan, including large framed art pieces!
Interesting items scanned
We received a batch of film slides from our client Unilever. Sophie, one of our digitisation technicians, scanned these slides using our Epson film scanner. These beautiful photographs date from 1989 to 1990, and you can see that they are fairly modern due to their vibrant colours and excellent quality.
From the process images, you can see how these film slides are scanned. We use guides to ensure the slides fit properly into the scanner, with space between each slide to prevent them from overlapping. The guides also help keep the slides still inside the scanner so they do not move around when the scanner is closed.
You can also see that Sophie is wearing microfibre gloves to avoid creating fingerprints on the slides. This helps keep the slides clean and ensures the best quality possible during the digitisation process.
The oldest material we digitised this month came from Dartington Hall Trust. In this project, we worked with several notebooks and diaries belonging to Dorothy Elmhirst, one of the key founders of Dartington Hall in Devon. Some of these items date back to 1930. I particularly found the artwork on the front covers of her notebooks very interesting, especially this beautiful floral design.
My favourite item from this project is this pencil sketch of the Two Swans for the Swan Fountain. This drawing shows the Swan Fountain in the Dartington Hall Gardens, located within the Azalea Dell. The fountain is made up of a circular basin created from an old granite cider mill stone, a spring-fed water jet, and a sculpture of two intertwined swans carved from a block of Cornish granite.
The fountain was designed in 1933, with the swan sculpture itself being added in 1948.
Project of the month
The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo is the biggest project we worked on in May. We have a range of exciting material from them, including magazines, postcards, scrapbooks, photo albums, posters, negatives, and more!
To begin with, we are scanning the batch of magazines, as this is the first priority. Many of these magazines advertise the live events, which feature large outdoor performances including military bands, drumming displays, dance and cultural performances, as well as fireworks and projections on Edinburgh Castle.
The particular magazine shown in the video below advertises a pipe band performance from summer 2007. This video also includes behind-the-scenes footage showing how we handle and scan these magazines, alongside the final scans.
We also scanned a batch of slides from The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo using our Epson film scanner. These slides contain images from a variety of different performances.
Our digitisation technician, Zane, who is working on this project, picked out several of his favourite slides that he scanned. These slide images were taken during the late 80s to early 90s, but the image quality is excellent and the vibrant colours make them feel very life-like.
Preservation Tip
Metadata is extremely important, especially with the large number of magazines we have been given to scan. Metadata ensures that files are easily searchable and helps prevent any missing files or data. Without metadata, digital files can become meaningless over time.
Each of the magazines from The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo is named using the issue number, season, and year. Some materials, such as the slides from The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo, do not have a title or date. In these cases, we name them according to the description of the box or location they came from.
New and Upcoming Projects
We are starting several new and exciting projects in June, including work for the Museum of Scottish Railways, which is an ongoing project that I have worked on previously. We will also be starting projects involving bound material from Boots, oversized maps from the Yorkshire Archaeological and Historical Society, and many more!
I am also currently starting a new blog focused on one of the largest format materials we have ever scanned at TownsWeb. This is a large framed art piece from The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo, and I am excited to share the scanning process and how we process these scans to create one final image.
New Services and Improvements
In May, we had a new air purifier installed in our digitisation studio. This has been a great addition for minimising dust and keeping the environment clean.
It is very important that we keep our workspaces clean, particularly the Vanguard glass, as dust particles and other debris can affect the quality of our scans. The purifier also helps reduce pollen, which is especially helpful during spring. This improves our wellbeing and helps us perform at our very best!
If you have materials that need digitising, then please reach out to our team for a friendly chat.
Plus, don't forget to apply for our 2026 TWA Digitisation Grant, with 10 x £3,000 funding grants available - applications close on 5th June 2026, at 5pm.
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