Expert digitisation consultants
Inhouse collection & delivery service
Accredited digitisation studio team
Highly accurate results
Instantaneous digital content searches
Capture data from any material type
Showcase your collections online
Improve access & discoverability 
Fully immersive virtual experiences
Celebrating 100 Years with Seymour Hotels
Celebrating 100 Years with Seymour Hotels – Digitising a century, of some of the Seymour Hotel’s vast family archive, making up well over 13,000 pages.
Celebrating our Centenary year of business in 2020 one can imagine the volume of physical documentation we had in store. Five generations of memories and artefacts serving as a reminder of where we have come from and help to inform future business decisions. These documents are not only key from a business perspective but crucially maintain our links with our ancestors. As we look forward and plan for the future, thanks to TownsWeb, we can be reassured that our past is securely recorded, filed and remembered.
Safeguard material
Counter deterioration and loss as a result of handling with robust digital duplicates
Protect copyright
Manage the rights and restrictions of images, guarding against infringements
Broaden opportunities
Innovate to grow audiences and members and reconnect with existing ones
Generate revenue
Harness the value of heritage items and enjoy financial autonomy
Digitisation
Digitise your cultural heritage archives
Balancing access to cultural heritage archives against the vulnerable nature of physical items is a real dilemma for collection holders. Creating digital replicas of physical heritage material overcomes barriers to access and removes any associated risks to collections or to cultural legacy. Digitisation enables archive content to be used in powerful and engaging digital storytelling, regardless of collection diversity, while protecting the original items in their present form.
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Data Capture
Harness valuable, searchable content
If you want full control of your cultural heritage records then it is important to capture the data and information contained within it. We offer a range of data capture services, employed either at the point of, or post digitisation. Our specialist technicians help you to make the important move from physical cultural heritage archive to digital cultural heritage archive, harnessing the content contained within to drive your archive search.
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Publishing
Manage and showcase your collections
Increasingly, holders of cultural heritage archives are looking to find new and innovative ways to manage their collections and share their unique cultural legacy online. Records can be used to share cultural tradition and celebrate identity, creating digital stories in a way that physical collections cannot. PastView offers phenomenal opportunities for access and discovery, pushing the boundaries for heritage records and surpassing existing limitations.
Learn more about PastView
I’m here to help!
Talking to people about their specific material and short and long term archive goals is what we do. You really can’t beat speaking to a human, so do get in touch for an informal chat with Josh about the digitisation and publishing or your cultural heritage archive.
Book a meetingHear more from organisations we work with
"One of the most used parts of our local history collection our street directories were falling apart. Townsweb have created digital copies that will help us to preserve these historic volumes. Working with them has been a real pleasure. Despite the difficulties of working through a pandemic, they have been efficient and helpful, dealing with any problems quickly and easily. We would have no hesitation in using them again for future projects."
Carolynne Cotton
Kingston Heritage Service
"Revealing the Past: Unlocking the Treasures project, funded by The James Reckitt Library Trust, enabled us to digitise a set of 1800 glass plate negatives, photographs taken by Hull City Council’s Health Department covering a period from the 1880s through to the 1930s. Access to the original glass plate negatives is restricted due to their fragile nature and although a small proportion of them had been digitised 20 years ago, the quality of the files restricted what we could do with them.
Funding from The Trust enabled us to engage Townsweb to digitise all 1800 plates including broken and damaged ones. The detail is incredible – we have already blown some of the images up for our current exhibition allowing us to reveal aspects and details we hadn’t noticed. With many of the images previously unseen, we are now looking at ways in which we can engage users and provide access to this collection."
Carol Tanner
Hull History Centre
"One of the biggest headaches for our project to get our archives online and accessible to the public was our inability to easily create digital images of our larger than A3 collection of advertising posters, maps and plans of breweries and pubs. We were fortunate enough to win a grant from Townsweb Archiving to get a large portion of them properly scanned and have since put in a further order for more digitisation work due to the quality of their output."
Terry Critchley
National Brewery Heritage Trust
"This has been a project sitting in a cupboard for 30 years. The excitement and relief to see it in digital form is fantastic. The quality of the images will hopefully inform generations to come of the world in the early 19th century from America to Australia and back again. Thank you for all the care you have taken with these slides."
Gerald Slora
Private Individual
Recent news & customer stories from cultural heritage archives
Anne Lister meets digitisation and Gentleman Jack: capturing images and captivating thousands
The deciphered text brought the past to life in a colour and style never quite seen before
The story of the TWA Digitisation Grant told through the ARA’s ARC Magazine Microsite
Following the launch of the ARA’s ARC Magazine Microsite, we track the lifetime of the TWA Digitisation Grant, discovered through back issues of the ARC magazine!