What is Coventry Digital?

At its simplest, the archive is a collection about Coventry, made up of what we call the ‘assets’ of the archive, which are digital files – the documents, maps, photographs, sound and video. These we upload, or ‘ingest’ through a process called ‘accession’ once we have added in their story as 'metadata'

The archive works as a single system that holds lots of archives together making it searchable in a single effort. These archives include those held at the Herbert Museum, that created by the City of Culture Trust, the Belgrade Theatre, community group archives, business archives and family archives.

If we get the story of the assets right, we can link people, places and times across all these archive. With every photograph, film, document and video, there is very much a story to tell. Who are the people and the places, and what time does the asset speak of? To whom does the item belong? Who created it? This information is important and is added in as metadata.

Metadata is information held within the file. It is that metadata which we search when we use keywords. Typical metadata includes a title, caption or description, date of creation, plus copyright information, location and technical information. This information isn't always automatically there: Photographs taken with newer cameras will record large amounts of technical information whilst a scan of a photograph will need that information manually entering.

The knowledgebase articles will tell you about the various aspects of digitisation for Coventry Digital. We'll be adding and amending these support documents as we develop the site.