Royal Anthropological Institution (RAI) digitisation projects 10.09

Deacon Project:

This is being undertaken primarily at the instigation of a Fellow who wishes to use some of the images from the collection in a forthcoming book. He is quite elderly and would find it much more convenient to look at the images on his computer at home rather than to make visits to the RAI premises.

He has donated £1000 towards digitising the collection, and will be allowed copies once he has signed a licence making it clear that copyright resides with the RAI. He is primarily interested in the illustrations of geometrical sand drawings which Deacon made. This sum should easily cover the expenses of digitising the part of the collection which interests him; he is also concerned to preserve the collection for the benefit of the RAI.

Arthur Bernard Deacon, 1903-27, was a brilliant young anthropologist who studied at Cambridge and did his field work on the island of Malekula, (Vanuatu formerly the New Hebrides Group). He suffered an untimely death from black water fever. The work on the geometrical drawings was published posthumously, edited by Camilla Wedgewood (JRAI, Vol. 64, 1934, pp. 129-175). The RAI is in possession of his original notes and drawings.

This material is also of great interest to the people of Vanuatu, and the RAI has been approached in the past by the Vanuatu Cultural Centre (VCC). Nothing developed at that time, but now the RAI hopes that work on the project can be of benefit to the VCC. In principle, the RAI is happy for material concerning particular cultures to be available for study in the relevant areas (subject to copyright restrictions).

Rates for digitisation of delicate material of this nature being very high, the archivist has decided to do it herself at her normal rate of pay. The items which are too large to fit in the scanner (rubbings of native drums, &c.) may however be sent out for photographing. Some work on the project has been done, but, due to pressure of other work, not yet enough to work out an average rate for calculating how much money would be needed to complete the project. Once this is established the archivist will contact the VCC, the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and the British Museum, all of whom have an interest in the material and may be willing to contribute in return for a copy of the digitised collection.

The work done so far has been to scan the images and save them as 600dpi tiffs, and also as 300dpi jpegs. The former are thought of as preservation copies, the latter as working copies. It is the jpegs which will be shared with contributors, the tiffs will be preserved at the RAI. Matters relating to long-term preservation of these digital copies are of paramount importance.

The collection has been catalogued, each piece having its own number and description. This type of metadata will need to be kept with the digital copies in order to make sense of them. How exactly this is to be achieved has not yet been decided.

The project thus needs solutions to the question of how best to preserve and to index the material (in addition to finding funding).

The Munro Project

This is a similar, but much more complex project involving material from various institutions both in Great Britain and in Japan.

Neil Gordon Munro, 1863-1942, was a Scottish doctor who ended up in Japan. His initial interest in archaeology developed into a fascination with the Ainu people due to a similarity of their use of design with the old material he had studied. The Ainu may be the original inhabitants of Japan, but now they live mainly in the northernmost island of Hokkaido, and for many years have been discriminated against. There is currently a revivial of interest in their culture. The RAI holds Munro’s typescripts for his intended book (subsequently published as Ainu Creed and Cult, edited by B.Z. Seligman. Columbia University Press, 1963), many letters and photographs. Objects collected by him are in the museums of Edinburgh and Hokkaido, further correspondence at the London School of Economics, and more photographs and negatives at the National Museum of Japanese History, Tokyo (NMJH). There is also film material in various places. The project aims to gather these various items together in a digital format for the use of scholars, and for the interest of the general public (museum visitors).

The material has already been digitized. Decisions are now to be made on how best to present the material. High resolution tiff copies will be held by each participating institution of their own collection, and the lead institutions, the RAI and the NMJH, will preserve tiff copies of the entire project. In addition, each institution will have a lower resolution ‘working copy’ of the entire project, edited for any possibly offensive references by the Ainu participants in the Project.

There are many cross references between material from different institutions in the Project (for example the NMJH may have negatives of the RAI photographs which in turn may have useful handwritten notes by Munro; museums may hold objects mentioned in letters held by other insitutions, &c., &c.). Some work on this has already been done by people at the NMJH, but using a computer program developed there. The RAI already had a paper catalogue of its own material; the status of cataloguing in other institutions is not currently known, but will be different, and obviously in some cases will be in Japanese.

Like the Deacon Project, issues of preservation and indexing are of concern, along with presentation of material for different user groups, and translations. Ideally all metadata should be in both English and Japanese. Any work needs to be done with the cooperation and agreement of all partners (except for matters relating purely to an individual institution).