On the 8th December 2011, Design Archives at the University of Brighton hosted a ‘Digitisation of Archival Content – sharing expertise’ seminar. This was a free afternoon event with an aim of giving the Floating Memories participants an insight into the care and digitisation of archival materials – a little bit of a ‘behind the scenes’ peek into what they do, if you like. The Design Archives planned and organised the event in collaboration with the Heritage Lottery funded ‘Floating Memories’ project run by Paul Farrington.

The day was structured around talks by members of the Design Archives team around the ‘lifecycle’ an archival item goes through when prepared for digitisation – from collection management, conservation issues and the physical digitisation of an object, to cataloguing and dissemination of the digital file, finishing on digital preservation. The event was attended by a great mix of people from undergraduate, post-graduate and doctoral students to people from the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. The question and answer session afterwards sparked up some interesting conversations about the future of digitised materials. As the digital age is still finding its feet to a certain extent, the importance of looking after the originals was highlighted. Naturally the great success of digitisation projects and the way in which they open up archives to people unable to visit were very much applauded and we obtained some very positive feedback from the attendees.