Digitizing Historical Materials

 

• Why do we digitize materials?

• What are the different ways that we can digitize?

• What do we do with the files?

Scanning

• Scan samples
  • Color
  • Grayscale
  • Black/White
• Scan quality sample
  • 72 color
  • 300 color
  • 600 color
  • Sizes:
    

    resolution	100	300	600
    24 bit color	2.5 MB	22 MB	90 MB

    LC Glass Negative Scanning (800dpi)

Cell Phone Camera Apps

• Camera 360 (tripod) Android   | IPhone
• CamScanner PDF Creator Android | IPhone

Manipulating images

• Original Scan
• Manipulated Scan
  • GIMP Mac and Windows
  • Paint.net Windows
  • Free resizing tool

Digitizing Texts

• Transcription
  • Sample document
  • Policies (Darwin, Addams, Worcester Women’s Oral History Project)
• OCR (Optical Character Recognition)
  • OCR from Typed Letter
  • OCR from book
• Keywords and Metadata

Quality Control

• Proofreading images to make sure they are complete, cropped well, color accurate
• Proofreading transcriptions according to guidelines
• Proofreading metadata and descriptions

Digitizing Lab!

• We have 10 historical items.
• Using your phone (not optimal, but…) digitize each item and save on your computer
• Pass each folder to the next person, until you have done all ten.
• If you think that the image(s) needs to be manipulated, create a copy of the file and edit it to improve it.
• Post them on Basecamp as a folder in Docs & Files, and take any notes needed.
• We will be using these images in class on Thursday.