AGI Members and non-member had the opportunity to join us at the National Collection of Aerial Photography (NCAP) on the 14th of March 2024 for a tour of one of the most remarkable archives and geospatial digitising operations.
NCAP is one of the largest collections of aerial imagery in the world. It comprises more than 26 million aerial photographs featuring historic events, landmarks and places, not just in Scotland and the UK, but from around the globe.
Dr Allan Williams, and the NCAP Team, helped us follow the journey of an archive image from remote storage into a local store and then on to either print or film presentation, to arrive at digitisation, which includes customised robotic workstations capable of incredible high-resolution scanning of thousands of images every week.
We also found out how the collection is catalogued and searched spatially, how it is monetised to support the Herculean digitisation programme, but also freely available for use by researchers.