Recently scanned image from the Underwood & Underwood Glass Stereograph Collection. Negative, half of a stereo pair, photographer unidentified |
The first Archives Center videodisc contained color transparencies from the Donald Sultner-Welles Collection, and the surrogate was intended to provide rapid access to the photographs while the originals were in cold storage. There was no database, but videodisc frame number sequences were recorded laboriously for folder-level descriptions in the 350-page finding aid. Armed with these frame numbers, one could zip swiftly to specific images and image groups, or one could browse the videodisc at random, then look up descriptions by frame number in the finding aid.
The Underwood & Underwood collection was accompanied by a database, however. The Museum's IT staff persuaded us that this was the way to go, and it represented a technological and philosophical breakthrough for us. Using dBaseIV, we catalogued all 28,000 items in an incredibly short time. Thanks to a grant, we hired a well-known contractor in the field to copy all the plates onto 35mm film with a custom-made animation camera; the film was then transferred to videotape, from which a videodisc was created. My original assumption was that access to the videodisc images and accompanying descriptive data would be accomplished in the Archives Center on a stand-alone computer connected to a videodisc player (possibly forever), and our collection-level SIRIS record stated that procedure.
When we were later able to export our dBaseIV data into SIRIS, online access to these images seemed feasible at last. We set about digitizing the Underwood & Underwood plates from the videodisc, using an inexpensive screen-capture device called "Snappy." The procedure was surprisingly quick, but it resulted in surprisingly low-quality surrogates as well. Think of how many generations these images represented: they are digital files created from analog video images from a videodisc, which in turn had been created from a videotape copy of a 35mm film copy! (Never mind the inherently low resolution of "Snappy" files!)
The vast majority of these poor-quality Underwood & Underwood images remain online, although some have been replaced by new scans from the original plates on an ad hoc basis as researchers order copies, and the difference is enormous. These replacements seem to proceed at a glacial pace, considering the high number of poor copies remaining online. These old images remain an embarrassment and viewers have complained, but we feel that they're better than nothing. What do you think?
David Haberstich
Curator of Photography, Archives Center
how about a systematic effort to digitize images; upload to flickr or wikimedia commons.
ReplyDeletevolunteers can be marshalled, like the http://www.si.edu/Volunteer/DigitalVolunteers