For the past five years volunteers at the Orange and District Historical Society have gone through the laborious task of making digital copies of negative photographs from Orange’s history.
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However, with 1.2 million negatives in its archive, a legacy from the Central Western Daily, the society desperately needs funding so it can purchase the right equipment to achieve the task.
With a high-powered computer system and technology required to create a searchable database, as well as an additional storage system and negative scanner, the cost will come well into the thousands of dollars.
However, most funding grants are not open to the volunteer organisation because it is not a museum so it has to raise a lot of of the money itself, although Orange City Council has helped.
Volunteer Toney Fitzgerald is campaigning for donations after coming across the issue while searching for old images of Walkers Brewing Co when he was bringing the beer company back to life.
“I was coming here and seeing the work the volunteers are doing to digitise everything to do with Orange’s history [and] I found the equipment was so [slow],” he said.
“[The volunteers] were a great help but I could see their frustration.”
Orange Historical Society secretary Phil Stevenson said the current system involves a camera and a light box and takes between 20 and 30 seconds to capture each image.
“Before that we used a flatbed scanner and it was about three minutes per image,” Mr Stevenson said.
“In the five years we’ve been at it we’ve done between 10,000 and 20,000 images but we want to do the rest of them in a reasonable amount of time, it’s still years and years of time.
“We want to be doing hundreds of thousands of negatives in the next couple of years.”
As well as preserving the historical images, president Elisabeth Edwards said they also need to have all the paper documents entered into the digital records.
“The negatives go back to 1955 and the ones from 1955 to 1972 are the older style and some of those are in very bad condition and we are trying to save them,” Ms Edwards said.
“There’s been some fantastic finds, wonderful stuff, the way people used to live in the 1950s and 60s, it’s part of history now.”
To donate email orange.history@yahoo.com.au or phone Lis on 6362 8647 or Phil on 0402 412 188.
Tanya Marschke
I am based at Orange and cover a wide range of subjects as well as the weekly business column. I've worked consistently in the the media industry since 2006 including the past seven years at the Central Western Daily. Before moving to Orange, I worked as a journalist at weekly newspapers the Beaudesert Times and the Gold Coast Sun in Queensland, as well as the Scone Advocate in the Hunter Valley. I started my career at the Ridge News in Lightning Ridge while I completed my journalism studies remotely at Charles Sturt University in Bathurst.
I am based at Orange and cover a wide range of subjects as well as the weekly business column. I've worked consistently in the the media industry since 2006 including the past seven years at the Central Western Daily. Before moving to Orange, I worked as a journalist at weekly newspapers the Beaudesert Times and the Gold Coast Sun in Queensland, as well as the Scone Advocate in the Hunter Valley. I started my career at the Ridge News in Lightning Ridge while I completed my journalism studies remotely at Charles Sturt University in Bathurst.
