House of Images are able to provide a range of products and services to educational establishments.
School Magazine Digitisation
HoI have worked with a number of schools to digitise their magazine collections. These include Bloxham School, Stonyhurst College, Denstone College, Kings School Tynemouth and Queen Elizabeth Grammar School Blackburn.
The magazines are digitised as pdf files and are supplied in fully searchable format by year, by decade and in one complete combined volume and, aside from the preservation aspect, provide both an invaluable aid for staff who need to extract information from the magazines and also as a means of generating income through sales to past pupils.
Representatives from Bloxham, Denstone and the Kings School have provided examples of how the digitisation has helped them.
From Peter Barwell, Honorary Archivist at Bloxham School (peter.barwell@btinternet.com):
We do get requests from people who know or have known Old Bloxhamists and are perhaps writing a book or needing information about the OB and the fact that we can quickly reply with details of the subject and possibly sibling that more than satisfies the questioner. Indeed they think it is incredible that a reply can be sent off immediately.
Sometimes the OB Committee want details about people if they are to introduce them at a dinner or meeting.
Sometimes when an OB strikes fame, people want to know about their background.
Sometimes people need to know the background of a building built at the school 100 years ago – it is all there in the Bloxhamists but would take hours of reading and research to find the information that we can pull up on screen in a few minutes.
Writing School Histories would be so different and save so much research. Unfortunately says the Master who recently wrote The History of Bloxham, my project hadn’t We have three key areas of use currently:-been completed when he wrote it. He says he would have loved it.