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...