Overdue

Needless to say, an update to this blog is long overdue, but as my dad always said, "Better late than never." Today we are getting our first taste of video digitization. Even though I watched the tutorial, I didn't quite understand at first the complexity of the setup. Although not as complex as it might seem at first, it seemed odd that we had to use a camcorder as a converter for the VCR. But, once everything is set up, you just let the computer do the hard work. That seems to be the good thing about this kind of work, if you can get the setup together, the computer does all the hard stuff for you. Finally serving their purpose...

As for a project update, I've started scanning letters at 400 dpi and 24 bit color, according to the best practices given to me by the head librarian at the Stark Center. I had done test scanning prior to that using ABBY at 300 dpi but it didn't turn out up to expectations. Also for test purposes, I converted one image into a text-searchable PDF. I'm unsure if it will do the same thing with others but the resulting PDF file overlay a darker text on top of the original type, making it look very funky. The ink on this one page was particularly light, so it is possible that those that have darker ink may not come out with the darker computer generated letters. To be continued...

My History of Digitization

On Christmas Day, 1995, my family bought an IBM Aptiva personal computer. We didn't get Internet until the next summer in 1996, but we mostly used it to play games such as Solitaire, Myst, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? , and Silent Steel (a full motion video game). My first experience of digitization I can remember began with weather tracking coordinates from Hurricane Roxanne available online from our local news stations. I guess it sounds somewhat silly for an 8 year old girl at the time to be interested in tracking coordinates for hurricanes, but at my house we owned a cork board picturing the gulf coast and we would track the coordinates of a hurricane as it approached land with push pins. I found it fascinating that I could find the old coordinates online, after the fact, and subsequently re-track on our cork board if I wanted to.

Like two of my other classmates, my academic interest in digitization was piqued when Quinn came to speak to our Intro to Preservation class about this exact subject. Until that point, what we had read in that class was mostly theoretical, but it finally felt somewhat tangible after he spoke to us. Following the presentation, I felt motivated to go out right then and there and find and save all those treasure troves of photos, audio, film, etc. on backlog at institutions that are in danger of being lost forever. Thus, after this initial excitement wore off and considering that most content is now born-digital, it seemed more than appropriate that getting hands-on experience would be appropriate for any kind of preservation career.

Sooo...from my experiences in this class, I would like to apply it in the museum world. In a 2004 survey of technology and digitization in museums more than 50% of museums responded that digitizing photographs was a top priority for them. Regardless of statistics, digitization is relevant in most every cultural heritage institution and I want to be a play an educated part in it.