Every DT Advanced Projects engagement starts from the same premise: we’ve never done exactly this before.
Most digitization work is, by design, repeatable — the same careful process applied consistently across a large, fairly uniform collection. DT Advanced Projects exists for everything that falls outside that description: the objects, materials, and challenges that don’t fit a standard capture workflow at all, and require designing the right approach from scratch rather than adapting an existing one.
What Makes It Different
Most digitization vendors have one workflow and ask every collection to fit it. DT Advanced Projects inverts that: it assumes the collection won’t fit, and builds the workflow around the object instead.
- Engineering on demand, not off the shelf. When a challenge genuinely has no existing answer, DT Advanced Projects draws directly on DT Heritage’s own imaging engineers — the same team that designs DT’s capture hardware — to build new rigs, techniques, or handling methods for that specific object or material, rather than forcing it through equipment designed for something else.
- Comfort with real risk. Deteriorating nitrate film, unstable objects, and hazardous specimens all carry handling risk that a standard production workflow isn’t built to absorb. DT Advanced Projects is where that risk is planned for explicitly, rather than avoided by declining the project.
- A distinct offering from hardware R&D. DT Heritage’s Special Projects team builds custom hardware that institutions then operate themselves. DT Advanced Projects is different: DT DigiLabs performing the non-standard capture as a service, on the client’s behalf, start to finish — related work, but not the same engagement.
What It Covers
- Non-standard capture — sequential imaging, multiple capture types on the same object
- Rare, delicate, exotic, or dangerous materials — deteriorating nitrate film, unstable objects, hazardous specimens
- 3D and dimensional objects
- Custom consulting for unique capture and analysis challenges with no off-the-shelf answer
Who It’s For
DT Advanced Projects isn’t built around a single industry the way DT Identify or DT Registrar’s “Built For” lists are — it’s built around a type of problem, and that problem shows up across every sector DT DigiLabs serves:
- A film archive holding decaying nitrate stock that standard scanning equipment can’t safely handle
- A natural history collection with specimens too fragile, too large, or too hazardous for a conventional copy stand
- A museum with dimensional or sculptural objects that a flat-capture workflow simply can’t represent
- Any institution facing a single unusual object or small set of objects that doesn’t justify — or fit — a standard digitization program
Typical Use Cases
Deteriorating nitrate film
Nitrate film stock is chemically unstable, can degrade further with each handling, and in advanced stages of deterioration poses a genuine fire risk. Capturing it safely means designing handling procedures and equipment around that risk from the start — not adapting a standard film-scanning workflow and hoping it holds up.
Sequential and multi-capture imaging
Some objects can’t be fully documented in a single exposure or a single capture method — a bound object that needs page-by-page sequential imaging plus a separate binding record, for example, or an object that needs both standard photography and a technical imaging pass to be properly understood. DT Advanced Projects designs the multi-step capture plan a single-shot workflow can’t provide.
Dimensional and 3D objects
Sculpture, decorative arts, and other three-dimensional material need a fundamentally different approach than flat-copy digitization. DT Advanced Projects scopes the right capture method for the object’s actual geometry, rather than flattening the problem to fit standard equipment.
Hazardous specimens
Some natural history and scientific specimens carry handling hazards — chemical preservation media, biological risk, or physical instability — that require specific protective measures before any camera comes near them. DT Advanced Projects plans capture around the hazard, in consultation with the institution’s own safety and collections staff.
Often the Starting Point, Not the End Point
Because DT Advanced Projects engagements tend to involve unusually significant or unusually difficult material, they’re frequently the beginning of a longer relationship, not a one-off job. Once the unusual capture work is complete, the resulting images are exactly the kind of collection DT Identify, DT Cipher, or DT Registrar can then make searchable — identifying people, transcribing text, or cataloging objects captured through a process no standard workflow could have handled.
Pairs Well With
Every DT DigiLabs product. DT Advanced Projects is often the starting point for a project that later adds DT Identify, DT Cipher, or DT Registrar once the unusual capture work is complete.
If your collection includes material that doesn’t fit a standard process — or you’re not sure whether it does — DT Advanced Projects is built to take it on. Describe your challenge to our team.