8,400 sheets in a quarter, with a provenance record for every one
A county archive with a fifteen-year digitisation backlog needed conservation-grade restoration that its committee could actually approve.
Hollowfield Record Office
8,400
sheets in the first quarter
100%
treatments revertible
0
words reconstructed into losses
The challenge
Fifteen years of accessions had outrun the digitisation programme. Parish registers and estate papers were foxing faster than they could be photographed, and the conservation committee had already rejected two commercial restoration tools on the grounds that neither could say what it had changed.
The approach
- Condition surveyed once per accession run, in the conservator's own damage vocabulary, and applied across the intake.
- Existing capture workflow left untouched - files came in read-only from the archive's own WebDAV store.
- Foxing and tide lines lifted as a separate layer from the iron gall ink beneath them.
- Losses outlined and rebuilt as paper only; any text falling inside a loss marked rather than filled.
The provenance overlay is what got this past our conservation committee. We can show exactly which pixels are ours.
The results
- 8,400 sheets restored and catalogued in the first quarter, against a previous annual rate of about 5,000.
- Every treatment retained as a revertible version, with a reconstruction overlay attached to the catalogue record.
- Palaeographic transcription delivered as separate text, with abbreviation expansions marked for the editor.
This is an illustrative scenario rather than a named customer. It is written to show what a deployment of this shape involves, and the figures describe the pipeline’s behaviour rather than a specific organisation’s results.