The British Museum and the digitisation of history

The British Museum is one of the greatest museums of the world, housed in one of Britain's architectural landmarks in the heart of London. Founded in 1753 the British Museum holds in trust for the world a collection of art and antiquities from ancient and living cultures. Today it remains at the forefront of research into cultural and historical artefacts, thanks in part to GE Inspection Technologies imaging and digitisation techniques. We spoke to Janet Ambers, a scientist at the British Museum.

Behind the scenes
The British Museum draws visitors from all over the world, from serious students to tourists who come to look at the famous collection of ancient Egyptian mummies. However, there is a great deal more to the museum than just the displays and glass cases.

The British Museum was among the first to recognise that in-house scientific expertise was essential, both for the care of its collections and for their proper interpretation. Behind the scenes the Museum's scientists work with an array of specialist equipment, from the scanning electron microscope to X-radiography. Science can help in the understanding of objects from all cultures and in their preservation for future generations. Interdisciplinary study, involving the collaborative efforts of curators, conservators and scientists, continues to take on new challenges and to find new solutions.

The Museum's Department of Scientific Research is always keen to exploit the latest techniques, and recently it became interested in the digital systems available from GE Inspection Technologies. After a few demonstrations and trials with digital equipment, the Museum decided to acquire a RADView Film Digitiser. The new equipment has been installed in the Museum's laboratory, with intriguing results.

Long-term storage
We use the film digitiser in the first place to record our old films, to preserve what we already have says Janet Ambers. We have 4,000 or so old films in the archives, some of them dating back to the 1950s and developed manually.

Many of these are in very poor condition. With the RADView Film Digitiser we can scan them and store them in TIFF format, for example. Once we have the image in digital form it is much easier to call it up from the archives and use it for various publications. We can also sharpen the edges and enhance the image quality.

Looking for details
Archiving old films is an important task, but it is by no means the only use of digitisation. The British Museum scientists have been doing a lot of try-outs recently on materials, such as ceramics which are difficult to radiograph. They also use it to examine watermarks on paper or patterns on swords, to mention just a few examples. " It is difficult to see features on ceramics without using digitisation," says Janet Ambers. "It enables us to zoom in on and enhance details." By way of example, Janet shows the images of an Islamic vase with lots of precious inlay.

The difference between the original X-ray laid on the lightbox and the digital image on the monitor is astonishing. Details of the vase can be seen clearly enough on the film, but when the digitised image is enlarged on the screen even greater detail is revealed. It is also possible for digital images to be shared among several scientists, who can then add their own comments and texts.

These important advantages enable the Museum to considerably broaden the scope of its research into innumerable objects. Looking towards the future, full digital radiography may prove to be the best way forward for radiography in Museums. Due to the modular structure of the RADView workstation, it would be easy to extend the existing infrastructure with any of the digital modalities. This is the power of the Digital Systems!

This is a "mermaid" donated to the Museum in 1942 by Prince Arthur of Connaught. It was said to have been caught 200 years earlier, in the sea around Japan. In fact when the object was X-rayed it became obvious that it was a man-made fake put together from a number of different pieces. The tail is part of a large fish (with bones clearly visible) and is shaped with a piece of metal. The body is made of shaped leather and the teeth seem to be from another fish.