Digitization Project

I'm relocating this from the staff wiki, since all the rest of the information about the project is here. Note that some of this information conflicts with earlier posts-where that is the case, this information takes precedence.

Scanning Standards

For the Barclay letters project:

Approximate time per image: 4 mins 30 secs

1. Open the HP solution center.

2. Choose "scan picture."

3. Make sure the initial scan screen is set to scan a color picture, that it is scanning from the glass, that it is saving to a file, and that it is saving as a .tiff file. The resolution should be set to 300. I have tried to make all these setting defaults, but check just in case.

4. Click Scan

5. On the next screen, set the filename and the base scan name. Files should be saved to c:/digital project. Then click OK.

6. on this next screen, you need to adjust the lighten/darken and sharpness settings. These are found to the right of the screen. The light/darkness settings should be: Highlights: -20, Shadows 0, Midtones 0. Sharpness should be high. The scanning software will give you attitude about some of these settings later, just remember, it's wrong, and it needs to use your settings.

7. Now adjust the scan area by grabbing and moving the dotted lines.

8. Now hit accept. The software will start giving you grief here about your settings, make sure you tell it to use yours and not the recommended scanning settings.

9. Now, open the file in photoshop. As you are opening the file, you will need to right-click on it, choose "rename" and use your delete and arrow keys to clean off the last three numbers in the scan filename. The scanner appends these automatically, I have not been able to make it stop.

10. Depending on how you scanned it, you may need to rotate the image so the text is reading left to right. Do this by going to Image->Rotate Canvas.

11. Go to image->Image size and reduce the size to APPROXIMATELY 800 pixels wide by 600 pixels high. This is not a hard and fast rule-the letters are different shapes and the exact measurements you use will vary. Use your judgement.

12. Go to File->Save As. Set the "format" drop down to "jpeg." Adjust the filename. Hit Save.
In the image quality dialogue, set the qaulity slider to the exact middle. click OK.

13. rise and repeat.

File Naming
Files are named by the following protocol:

First, the date of the letter in YYYY_MM_DD in numeric format: 1867_20_01

Then "archive" or "web" depending on whether the image is a jpeg or a tiff.

Then The sequence numbers, separated by colons: 1_5 is the first of five sides.

Example: 1856_06_02_archive_1_4.tiff

Is the first page of a five-page letter written on June second, 1856, and this particular image is an archival tiff.

StorageWe are storing the files at c:/digital project. Kyle is trying to back them up to a network drive periodically.

For the purposes of forming titles, the names of Barclays' mother is "Mary Elanor Paxton Barclay" and the name of the sister is "Hannah Moore Barclay."

I tried loading a test document into the archive today, and there are a few things to be aware of when loading documents:

First, since each page is its own file, there needs to be a way to tell people which file represents the first page, second page, etc. There is a "description" field for each file, I suggest we use this to designate the order of the pages. It would also be good if it designated wether the file was the large archival file or the display image.

So:

"First page: Large archival quality"

Is a possible model.

Second, I'm seeing problems with the transcripts-since the file names are going to be part of the URLs, they can't have spaces in the filenames. They also don't seem to have any line breaks, which means when loaded into a web browser, they scroll off to the side. I am going to try and fix these problems, but it will probably have to be done manually.