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Public Archives in Minas Gerais will be digitized and offer access to its collection in the Net

The Public Archives in Minas Gerais (APM) is a treasure. Created in 1895, it keeps 14 thousand public and private photographs, among other documents, with significant content to the history of Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais and the country. The Cultural Association of the Public Archives in Minas Gerais (ACAPM), which maintains the collection and offers the population in general physical access to do research in the archives, will make its service broader. It is developing, with the support of the Data Processing Company of Minas Gerais (PRODEMGE), the project " Image Digitization: the preservation of Minas Gerais' memory", in the consortium of High Performance Metropolitan Networks in Belo Horizonte, or BH2.

The project has two main goals.The first one is to digitize the photographic documents and make them available in an information system to be used locally by its personnel, as well as by the public in general. Access to this system will be possible with BH2's high speed network infrastructure. The second goal, a consequence of the first one but by no means less important than it, is the preservation of the originals by reducing their handling, both by the people working at APM and by those who do research there.

The stages of the project in progress now are catalogue making and the preparation of the Controlled Vocabulary, a tool to standardize the index terms of photographic documents. All the work regarding the study of the collection and logical modeling has already been finished. The physical location of the hardware which will host the system still has not been defined. Either at PRODEMGE or at APM headquarters, the service will use a connection of 155 Mbps as an access link to BH2. At present, the staff at APM engaged in the project is working on its technological specification, and, according to PRODEMGE's Operation and Support superintendent, Nelson Spangler, part of the collection should be available in the network as of April.

Nelson informed that APM receives an average of 20 consultants a day. He believes that the number of people helped will grow with the digitization and the creation of the network interface to allow access to the archives' collection, but he does not risk making a prediction. According to Nelson, the main users of the archives are students, photographers, journalists and historians.

[RNP, 12.22.2000]