DRISA explained
The DRISA Archive keeps a selection of digital copies of the roughly 200 000 images in the Transnet Heritage Library in downtown Johannesburg. The DRISA (acronymn for Digital Railway Images of South Africa) project was formally launched during 2016 and will take a few years to complete. It is run and funded by volunteers, guided by a Memorandum of Understanding between the South African Institution of Civil Engineering and Transnet Freight Rail. At present, only a few thousand images have been processed, but the ultimate objective is to have the entire collection, properly catalogued with thumbnails, on this AtoM platform. AtoM is a fully web based archival application based on the standards of the International Council on Archives. AtoM is an acronymn for Access to Memory.
Sponsor
This website is managed, hosted and sponsored by Root3, an electrical engineering consultancy based in Bryanston, Johannesburg.
For first time users
The three most popular options are to:
Browse by Archival descriptions in the left side bar to see which collections are fully or partly available
Browse by Subjects or Places in the left side bar to look for keywords that may be of interest
Use the Search block at the top left to find images that may be of interest
When finding an image of interest, clicking on the image will produce a full view of the image along with all its associated data.
Atom allows many more advanced navigation and search features which should come intuitively after some use. For a detailed guide, consult the User Manual at:
https://www.accesstomemory.org/en/docs/2.5/
Contact
Johannes Haarhoff at johannes@haarhoff.org.za (DRISA project leader)
Yolanda Meyer at yolanda.meyer@transnet.net (Transnet Heritage Library)