Times of Malta has partnered with the National Archives to preserve and digitise its entire collection of physical photographs and negatives.

It’s a massive, time-consuming project that began years ago and is likely to take several more years to complete.

Initially, the collection was believed to contain tens of thousands of photos. Conservators now reckon it features up to one million images. 

The project was officially announced on Friday.

Work to protect the priceless collection began in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic and the National Archives is now digitising and cataloguing these photos.

Inspectors, conservators and archivists at the National Archives are all involved in the step-by-step process required to ensure each image is correctly preserved and documented.

First, archive inspectors checked the images and negatives for signs of damage before transporting the collection to the National Archives.  

From there, the digitisation process begins. Conservators carefully clean each photo or negative to remove any dust, oils or other dirt they may have accumulated over the years. The images then move on to another department, where they are scanned at high resolution and indexed.

It is then up to the cataloguing department to add any relevant keywords, metadata and other information to each photo, to ensure it can be found through searches.

Once that is done, the photos and negatives are bundled into special folders and stored in controlled conditions, to ensure they do not degrade.