Digitising all the posters, pictures, paintings and artworks has certainly been a useful exercise. It has:
- enabled unwanted physical items to be thrown away;
- prompted the permanent display of some paintings that had hitherto been stored away;
- given visibility to items normally stored away from view, using free standard issue Windows 7 software;
- prompted the purchase of a frame to rotate pictures through;
- prompted the flat storage of some items that had hitherto been rolled up in cardboard tubes;
- provided a digital record of our paintings of value for insurance purposes should that ever be required.
Since the numbers of items involved (in this case around 80) is relatively low, the whole exercise didn’t take long to do. However, as with all other digitising activities, dealing with a large backlog of material is always much more daunting and time consuming than simply doing it bit by bit as you go along. Now that the initial job has been done, the challenge will be to maintain the digital collection as new physical items are added and other items removed.