The Milwaukee Polonia digitization project is an ambitious endeavor – we’re in the midst of digitizing over 25,000 glass plate negatives. This may seem like a daunting task (it is!), but with a wel…

Yes, it is presumptuous to call scanning an “art,” when it is really more of a craft, but “The Craft of Scanning” doesn’t sound as sexy, so we will consider it for the time being as one of the fine arts, like music, or painting, or dance. This short treatise derives from work done in the process of scanning published and original materials to create PDF files for online publication or deposit in our institutional repository. This approach assumes you have a scanner and software to drive it, and also three software programs from Adobe (sold together as their Creative Suite): Adobe Acrobat, Photoshop, and InDesign. An ALCTS webinar version is available at http://www.ala.org/alcts/confevents/upcoming/webinar/irs/082411 ; or download the .wmv file below

At our personal digital archiving events, we get various questions about scanning family photos, slides, negatives and film. Questions like:  What type of scanner should I use? What resolution should I use? How can I scan negatives? While we’ve focused on developing tips and resources for saving personal digital materials created with software and hardware, […]

The following is a guest post by Barry Wheeler, Digital Projects Coordinator, Office of Strategic Initiatives In part 1 of this blog series, we saw that manufacturers claimed “resolution” is based on the number of steps per inch a small motor moves the scanner assembly (the rows) and the number of tiny sensors per inch […]

History students digitize historical objects in their communities.

Streamlining Collaborative Digitization: How to order and install multiple digitization work stations By Melissa Tulig and Kimberly Watson Digitizing tens of thousands of plant specimens within one

The Library of Congress occupies three massive and ornate buildings in the center of Washington, D.C. But those edifices house just part of the collection, which spans hundreds of miles of shelves …

Meditation on how you gauge quality or come up with coll-dev guidelines for a (born-)digital collection. Size ain't everything. Interrelationships, diversity, thematic strengths also count.

On choosing scanners and scan resolutions. Part 1 of several.

Grant-funded effort to train OCR to handle 15th-17th c. printed docs. English only for now.

Examples of scanning defects, and how to fix them.

Digitization in the Real World highlights 34 cases of digital collection building in libraries, archives, museums, and cultural heritage institutions throughout North America. This book is written by practitioners for practitioners focusing on lessons learned from small to medium-sized digitization projects. Digitization in the Real World was edited by Kwong Bor Ng and Jason Kucsma.

Info on digitizing special collections and archives, including model donor agreements.

Consider this digital photo I took of the face of the Albert Einstein Memorial outside the National Academy of Sciences. Although my photo tells us something about what the memorial looks like, I don’t think anyone would say that I “digitized” it.  We think about this kind of photo as a creative work (albeit not […]

Press director talks about clearing image rights for books.