Gigamacro imaging of Queen Elizabeth I prayer book

Even from the first week of my placement, projects started coming up with a speed of light. The bad thing was that I had never in my life heard of most of the devices used. On the other hand, the good thing was that I could take my time and play around with each one, go through the guidelines and take my own notes. That helped to gain a bit more confidence when it came to the actual projects. Also, my role for the beginning was to assist, help but also observe, discuss and learn for future projects.

One such project was the digital imaging of one of Queen Elizabeth I prayer books; a partnership working between Historic Scotland and The National Archives of Scotland. The first documentation attempt was done in December 2013 where the expected deliverable has been agreed to be a very high resolution image of the book that would be added to Scotland’s historical document archives. The device that was used is called Gigamacro and is an imaging device designed to produce very sharp focus high resolution macro photographs. Unfortunately, while documenting the book the first time, the spine moved slightly and the quality of photos at this part did not correspond with our standards. So this second time, only this part needed to be documented. The procedure was relatively simple; once we set the parameters, there was not much to do but wait for the results.

I couldn’t help but notice how beautiful, detailed and well-made the book was. Elizabeth made the book herself when for one of her step-mothers and what is amazing is that she was only 13 at the time! It took approximately three hours for the Gigamacro to document the book’s spine. Now the stitching procedure is waiting for us, when we find some time to work on it.