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Mass digitisation of images (York)

Created by clare wf on Apr 12, 2011 · last edited by Paul Wheatley · on May 10, 2012 (view history) · 5 versions

Basic description	A rapid digitisation project is digitising some 200,000 plus archival documents in five months. The project will create TIFF master images and is being carried out in-house, using an SMA bookscanner and two Nikon digital cameras. Work is being done by three teams of temporary staff who work in pairs. Emphasis is on the provision of high quality access copies, rather than surrogates. The cameras photograph in RAW and these are processed, cropped and converted to TIFF using Adobe Lightroom. The SMA scanner natively creates TIFF images. The workflow is, currently, manual and spreadsheets are used to track the digitisation.
Licensing	The license has not yet been agreed but access to a high resolution JPEG copy will be free to those at educational institutions. A preview size jpeg will be available for non-commerical use to all.
Institution	University of York
Collection expert	Julie Allinson
Issues brainstorm	how do we ensure that files copied from machine to machine (or hard drive to filestore) retain integrity and are free from corruption? how can we check for anomalous files, and spot possible problems with the camera / scanners? how do we check that all files are valid TIFFs? how do we check for mis-alignment, foreign objects, blurring, distortion? how do we automate checking each day's output against the work record (spreadsheets), eg. do we have the correct number of images per archival document, do we have all the files noted on the spreadsheet (and no extras)?
	These issues were not explored in any detail.