Cultural Collections Enhancement Project Behind the Scenes

Key Info

  • Position Title
    Digitisation Officer
  • Branch
    Cultural Collections Enhancement
    Division
    First Nations

Email Russell Perkins

Russell has nearly a decade's worth of experience in digitisation with some of Sydney's most prominent cultural institutions. He has broad experience across a multitude of disciplines including 3D objects, art reproduction, glass plate and film negatives, photogrammetry, and reflected infrared and ultraviolet imaging. Russell spent his formative years in commercial photography, working with well-known brands to provide catalogue, corporate and advertising imagery.

He joins the Australian Museum after seven years with the State Library of NSW, where he spent the first five years as an Imaging Officer on the Digital Excellence Program, a multi-year program dedicated to the digitisation of heritage objects for preservation and public accessibility. The program established heritage digitisation at a scale never seen before in Australia, and defined the Library as a world-leading institution for digitial excellence. Russell provided tens of thousands of images to public record, handling some of the most fragile, unique and cherished objects under the Libraries stewardship.

As a Cultural Collection Enhancement Digitisation Officer, Russell is providing high quality imaging of the museum’s First Nations, Pasifika and World Cultures collections as a team member of the Cultural Collections Enhancement Project.


Qualifications

  • BA Arts (Macquarie University)
  • Diploma Photography (TAFE NSW)
  • Cert IV Photo-Imaging (TAFE NSW)
  • Diploma Project Management (TAFE NSW)

Publications

  • ‘A Colourful Past’, SL Magazine, Winter 2019, State Library of NSW
  • ‘Call History’, Openbook Magazine, Summer 2022, State Library of NSW
  • ‘The Shelf Life of Zora Cross’, Cathy Perkins, Monash University Publishing, 2020 (Digital Art)
  • ‘Reading the Rooms: Behind the Paintings of the State Library of New South Wales’, UNSW Press, 2023 (Images supplied)