/alchemy-archival-tools

Tools to extract metadata and TIFFs from Alchemy database CD-ROMs

Primary LanguagePython

These tools can be used to extract TIFF files and metadata from a legacy database called Alchemy, created by Image Management Systems, Inc.

A website advertising this software can still be found here in all its crusty Web 1.0 glory.

This is part of a research project I'm doing with my academic advisor at IUPUI. The goal is to preserve 900+ CD-ROMs of scanned nonprofit tax forms.

Each CD-ROM stores the documents as a single gigantic binary file, which is actually countless TIFF files concatenated together. This tool separates them and also extracts relevant metadata as JSON.

Eventually, the documents will be digitally preserved in the PDF-A format and displayed in a searchable database for use by the public and by researchers.

To view our presentation, click here. The description of the event can be found here.