Project | Selection | Cataloging | Prescanning | Digital Conversion | Quality Control | Delivery | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Review of the collections resulted in the identification
of three basic types of material appropriate for digitization: standard-sized
printed material, oversized printed material, and three-dimensional items. Some
printed material such as pamphlets and songbooks, with no color but a
wide tonal range, could be captured effectively as 300 dpi 8-bit grayscale
TIFF images on a Xerox Docuimage 620s flatbed scanner. Much
of the flat material (such as ribbons, some sheet music, and some broadsides)
contains color information that had to be retained, so HP, Microtek, and
Agfa color scanners were used. We scanned them as 24-bit color TIFF images,
with an appropriate grayscale/color bar scanned with each document to
ensure color matching, at 400 dpi (although the final size depended on
the significant features of each
document). Because all of
these items have intrinsic value as physical objects, non-damaging techniques
were used to prepare them for scanning. Most
were in good physical condition, but some are low contrast documents (the
tonal difference between the medium and support is low). Great
care was taken in handling these items and in adjusting capture settings
(brightness, contrast, tonal reproduction curves) to produce digital files
of high quality, fidelity, and readability.
The largest percentage of the collection is composed of three-dimensional or oversized materials. We took two approaches to digitizing this material. Most of the items were shot using a PhaseOne PowerPhase digital camera mounted on a ZBE Satellite copy stand in our digital photo studio and an Epson 1640XL Graphics scanner. The PhaseOne camera allows digital images of up to 140MB in size, although our default was to shoot at 600 dpi. Our experience in capturing items for the H. F. Johnson Museum at Cornell demonstrated that quality digital imaging with a digital camera is a slow process; for most artifacts, we averaged only 20-30 scans a day. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Copyright
© 2002 Division of Rare & Manuscript
Collections For information regarding copyright issues and securing permission to publish digital reproductions of images from the Cornell University Collection of Political Americana, please consult our Copyright & Permissions Page. For
reference questions, send mail to:
rareref@cornell.edu |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||