MSI conference in Serbia

Our intellectual and tangible cultural heritage is of incalculable value. There are a great many libraries and archives in the world, and in their custody visitors can find ever more valuable documents. Because of the material they are made of, the lifespan of these valuable documents is limited.

Thanks to digitisation technology, in recent decades it has become possible in museums and archives to capture high-level digital copies of documents in a quality almost identical to the original. In Serbia the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SASA) created an outstanding digitisation centre in Belgrade, and the Matica srpska Library did so in Novi Sad. The digitisation procedures used in these institutions are of European standard and rival the world’s most famous museums.

Tripont and Danish Phase One, working together, organised a conference on 16 September 2021, combined with a Phase One workshop, where those interested could get to know the new equipment and technologies of the group of companies and of the Danish camera system. The host was the Digitisation Centre of the Academy, whose studio was designed and built by Tripont’s specialists. A special feature of the conference was the presentation of the new multispectral camera system.

Representatives of numerous Serbian institutions attended the event, including the Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade, the National Library of Serbia, the Matica srpska Library, the Museum of Yugoslavia, the Yugoslav Film Archive and the Museum of Science and Technology, as well as the management and staff of the Digitisation Centre of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. The guests were welcomed first by Aleksandar Kostic, head of the centre, and then by Balázs Dániel Peti, CEO of Tripont and of the Serbian Digital Emporium.

The presentations were opened by Tripont staff. Dániel Bedő, Phase One specialist and digitisation expert, presented the full range of modern technical solutions, introducing special digitisation solutions from maps and transparent materials all the way to the mass digitisation of books. Participants also learned that the group of companies provides a full-range service in the field of digital cultural heritage preservation. Henrietta Trádler presented to participants the possibilities of the Heritage digital archive service.

After the comprehensive introductory presentations, the tools of multispectral imaging, its wide palette of uses and the Phase One MSI system were presented by Gerald Schnittger, Phase One’s expert in this field. Multispectral imaging, MSI, involves imaging under light of different wavelengths, both visible and invisible to the human eye. The resulting group of images is analysed by experts using different light sources and filters. Among other things, the technology can be used for authentication, for establishing the year of manufacture, for recovering scraped-out text, and even for making visible the hidden text of period documents.

MSI can be an important technology in examining the authenticity of works of art, in researching a given artist’s painting methods and the materials and colours used in a painting, and it may also prove a useful procedure both in police investigations and in forensics, in the examination of particles and liquids invisible to the human eye.

At the event the professionals exchanged impressions, digitisation experience and future plans, which, we hope, will lead to the development of the digitisation equipment of institutions operating in Serbia and, in the long term, to better preservation of our collective cultural heritage.