Section
Archives
Newspaper and picture archives: the decisions taken at digitisation that cannot be taken again, the formats that survive, and the media that no longer read.
Every archive is the sum of decisions taken once, usually in a hurry, and never revisited: what to scan, at what resolution, in what format, and what to write down about each item while someone still remembered.
Here we look at those decisions and at the consequences of getting them wrong — file formats with a future, carriers that have already stopped reading, the cataloguing that turns a pile of scans into something findable, and the newspaper heritage that sits behind British picture libraries.
- New
Digitising a newspaper archive: the decisions that cannot be undone
A digitisation project is mostly logistics, and about six decisions. The logistics can be corrected as you go. The decisions cannot, because reversing one…
29 September 2026
- New
File formats for keeping photographs for decades
A format choice made today will be read — or not read — by somebody with no access to today's software. That is the whole problem, and it is why…
29 September 2026
- New
Getting data off optical disk, tape and other dead media
Somewhere in every long-lived picture archive there is a shelf of discs and cartridges from the years when they were the obvious way to store images.…
29 September 2026
- New
How long copyright lasts in a photograph
The commonest mistake in a picture archive is assuming that an old photograph is free to use. Age is not the test, and a photograph from the 1930s can be…
29 September 2026
- Archive 2005
Picdar milestones, 1984 to 2005
Two decades of installations, from the first mass image store on optical disk to the magazine groups of the mid-2000s.
- Archive 2005
Picdar fact sheet
Founded, owned, what it built and who used it — the record as the company stated it.
- Archive 2005
Picdar: history and philosophy
From DAM systems for the military and police in the early 1980s to Fleet Street and beyond.
- Archive 2005
Picdar — past, present, perfect
Unrivalled experience in digital asset management, as the company described itself.
Archive index
A census of this site: how much sits in each section, how much of it is reproduced 2005 archive and how much was written for the relaunch.
| Section | All | Archive | New |
|---|---|---|---|
| Picture desk | 8 | 3 | 5 |
| Asset management | 10 | 5 | 5 |
| Rights & licensing | 9 | 4 | 5 |
| Archives | 8 | 4 | 4 |
| Workflow | 11 | 8 | 3 |
| Case studies | 13 | 13 | 0 |
| News | 11 | 11 | 0 |
| Total | 70 | 48 | 22 |