Digitization Practices

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

The Conservation Center for Art & Historic Artifacts (CCAHA) is a nonprofit organization delivering a wide range of conservation and preservation services. Our mission is to provide expertise and leadership in the preservation of cultural heritage. CCAHA’s conservators repair and stabilize books, photographs, and documents. CCAHA’s preservation services staff works in the field providing education programs and helping institutions plan for the future of their collections.

As the Digital Imaging Manager at CCAHA, I oversaw the planning and execution of all digitization projects for cultural heritage collections, including scheduling, staffing, and delivery to client institutions. I developed and documented department-wide standards and workflows for high-resolution imaging, UV imaging, and conservation treatment photography, ensuring that all digital objects meet internal guidelines and client-defined preservation and access requirements. I worked closely with clients on projects ranging in scale to create documentation that has their goals at the forefront and meets them where they are – for instance, making sure that their defined deliverables can be supported by their current staffing and digital preservation frameworks. I also created detailed estimates and RFP responses for large-scale projects and collaborated closely with institutional partners, vendors, and internal staff to integrate imaging with conservation, housing, and registration workflows.

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 engaged with a variety of collections materials from many institutions, governments, and historical societies to create FADGI 4-star digital surrogates. I applied 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

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