The Digitization of the Slide Collection from the Saint Catherine Library Conservation Project

Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai holds one of the most important collections of Byzantine manuscripts in the world. Camberwell College of Arts has completed a detailed condition assessment of the manuscripts, and has collected photographs of the bindings on colour transparency (slide) film. In this paper, we explain why we chose film photography rather than digital, we describe the methodology of digitizing the slides and we explain how low-cost equipment can be used to produce digital images without compromising quality. We use the JPEG2000 format with a combination of Dublin Core for descriptive metadata and the DIG35 standard for technical metadata. We conclude with a short discussion of the limitations of our methodology and the resources available.