Digitization Practices
The Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) provides conservation treatment, digital imaging, and audio preservation services, as well as preservation training, assessments and consultations, and disaster advice on collections to clients. Additionally, free Preservation Leaflets which include guidance on identification, preservation, and care of collections materials as well as planning a digitization project to the cultural heritage community at large.
As a Collections photographer at the NEDCC I engage with a variety of collections materials from many institutions, governments, and historical societies to create FADGI 4-star digital surrogates. I apply archival theory to inform digitization workflows, metadata standards (XML, MARC, MODS), rehousing practices, and manage large-scale digitization projects.
Digitization Portfolio available upon request.
ACADEMIC EXPERIENCE
Group portrait of five women, one standing in a barrel. Inscribed on negative "Fletcher Photo" and "A barrelful of Sweet Things".
Texas State Library and Archives Commission, 1997.108.25
In Survey of Digitization, I gained a foundation in digitization methods and workflows for cultural heritage materials as well as experience planning, funding, and managing a digitization project. Scanned materials included: textual documents, glass plate negatives, negative and positive film, 35mm slides, photographic prints, and tintypes.
Due to COVID-19 restrictions we were not able to manually digitize audiocassettes and videocassettes, but were able to work with digitized files to learn the basics of editing, embedding metadata, and generating checksums for file integrity.
In addition to digitization methods and imaging tools, learned about FADGI standards and quality control, image editing and color correction, OCR capture and editing, copyright and legal issues, digital preservation, and file management. As well as experience using controlled vocabularies to collect, manipulate and embed sidecar Dublin Core XML metadata for digitized objects, and using Omeka to build a Digitization Portfolio.
The final project in this course was to write a draft NEH Grant Proposal for the digitization of a collection of your choice. Along with partner, Elizabeth Seeley, I co-wrote the draft application "Digitization of the Audiovisual Materials in the Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers at the Benson Latin American Collection".
Software used in this course:
Terminal/Command line functions
Adobe Acrobat
Adobe Photoshop
AEO-Light
Audacity
BWFMetaEdit
EpsonScan
Exiftool
FFMPEG
ImageMagick
Omeka
Tesseract OCR