Australia's history kept alive in the digital era

SEMA has transformed hard-copy documents, including original Hansard transcripts from Australia's federation in 1901, into digital images that are accessible online.

The historical Hansard collection is Australia's collection of political reports, media reports and newspaper archives, as well as other paper-based archives owned by the Parliamentary Library and other areas within the Department of Parliamentary Services. The range of documentation is broad in terms of both the content and the physical media type and quality, including simple A4 sheets, ageing broadsheet newspapers, and delicate copies of original historical representations.

The brief

In September 2009, SEMA entered into a Deed of Agreement with the Department of Parliamentary Services to deliver a solution to digitise the Hansard records and make them freely available to citizens. The project scope would include the scanning of the documents to create more than 15 million impressions over four years, including materials in varying stages of fragility but of significant national historic significance.

The solution

SEMA provides a document imaging solution for electronic capture and online archive presentment with on-site scanning occurring within Parliament House, and the solution server also being similarly located but with external validation and management.

• Specialist document preparation including tagging, batch separation and removal of spines, glue and any metalware
• Image cropping and enhancement to remove duplicate representation of the same information, such as dates, and improve the representation of aged pages
• Scanning of multiple sizes and shapes
• Remote verification and quality checked by qualified operators nationally
• Output to full colour 300dpi PDF supported by XML metadata that is audited to ensure it meets integrity requirements
• 100% text search capability, with 99% accuracy levels, as well as complex categorisation of materials
• Data correction and enrichment
• Metadata creation to enable easier searching and categorization functions
• Transfer of digitised images and metadata to the existing information system for online access, with extract from the localized server onto the DPS servers for general consumption

The outcome

The records have grown immensely over the four years of the project, and are now available through the ParlInfo Search. As each document was digitised, quality checked and validated, the audit process was then completed and the records securely destroyed on-site, with the records.

The future

The current technology that SEMA uses is world-leading, and we continue to enhance and improve the digitisation process to ensure increased efficiency and high searchability of the information. Future development will enhance both the information search functions and the contextual representation of critical content.