After reading through suggested standards for scanning processes based on each type of material or object, I can thoroughly understand why institutions\u2014despite enthusiasm for access and digital humanities\u2014might shy away from long term and collection-wide scanning projects.<\/p>\n

The Harry Ransom Center recently launched a digitization project entitled Project REVEAL <\/a>(Read and View English and American Literature).\u00a0 As an institution with astounding resources available to them, the Center had the luxury of approaching the project as a model of ideal digitization workflows for future scanning endeavors both in-house and in the wider community.\u00a0 Part of Project REVEAL’s objective was to scan twenty-five of the HRC’s English & American author collections in a way that respects original order and disregards the traditional approach of only digitizing collection highlights.\u00a0 Going box by box, folder by folder, and item by item, the project digitized and provided detailed metadata at the most granular level.<\/p>\n

Most organizations, however, do not have the time, finances, nor support to accomplish such a dedicated attempt at digitizing their collections.\u00a0 Collections may not be processed to the item level.\u00a0 Oversized or delicate items may require more specialized handling and scanning than the facility can accommodate.\u00a0 The money supporting the digitization may only stretch far enough to allow the scanning of collection highlights.<\/p>\n

To experiment with just how long a high quality scan can take, I digitized a proofing press run of a block from Wellesley College’s Book Arts Lab collection on my HP Photosmart C4700 flatbed scanner.\u00a0 The 3×4 inch scrap of card, scanned at 4800 dpi, took 1 minute to scan and save.\u00a0 While my flatbed is aged and amateurish compared to newer, professional grade scanners, items scanned at a high enough dpi to withstand being resized and to accommodate zooming features takes a marked amount of time, which increases many times over when digitizing larger items.\u00a0 Then there’s the concern of file size and type.\u00a0 I used a .jpeg format, since my purposes don’t require an uncompressed, high quality .tiff.\u00a0 But any archival purposes would require that caliber of format.\u00a0 The opening and downloading of higher quality files is its own time commitment and can severely slow down the loading of the image or the webpage in which it’s embedded, even though the excellence of the scanned image is worth the wait.<\/p>\n

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