#document preservation

an Epson Perfection V33 :)

A large part of what I do involves digitizing and archiving old documents related to the machines that I work on. I consider this to be a really important part of my work for the museum for a few reasons:

These documents are historically significant and necessary in order to keep the machines running. 

If I have a digital copy of a document, I can read it wherever I want, without risking the original copy becoming lost or damaged by me carrying it around.

Along the same lines, a digital copy serves as an emergency backup if the original gets damaged by some unavoidable disaster.

I believe knowledge should be freely shared, so the more people who have access to this information, the better.

When documents are scanned for archival, it’s crucial to capture them at the best quality possible, and as completely as possible. Its a big pet-peeve of mine when I see documents scanned at 300 DPI or lower, or compressed to save on file size. Look, it’s 2017, and we’re no longer living in the age of digital frugality. Scan your shit at the highest resolution you can, and in full-color, for fuck’s sake.

Anyway, when Astrid and I visited the AT&T Archives, we brought along a scanner that Astrid purchased especially for this trip. It fit nicely in a carry-on suitcase, and it had both a regular scanner glass, and an ADF. #nice, right? Yeah. #nice.

So we get to the archives, and start scanning, and we come to the terrible realization that this scanner is (for some reason) slamming the brightness and color curves of our scans against the wall. Wanna see what I mean? Check this out. Bad scan on the top, cleaned up on the bottom:

It got even worse with photographs. The Archives have amazing prints of all kinds taken directly from the original negatives. They’re gorgeous, friends. The quality is so good that it doesn’t even feel like you’re looking at a black and white photo! It feels like you’re holding a window into this long-gone place in time.  But naturally, the scanner screwed them as well. Top straight off the scanner, bottom restored in post by me: 

Only having 8 hours to work and one scanner meant that we had to capture the images, and deal with the cleanup later. Maybe it would be possible, maybe not, but our time in the archives was limited, and we had to make the most of it. We captured about 1000 pages in all (completely manually, since we didn’t trust the ADF with documents this old and precious) before we left. On the flight home, I had plenty of time to work in Photoshop and pull out as much of the original detail and clarity as I could. I’m rather proud of my results!

Now, you obviously can’t get something for nothing, and there’s a bit of a tradeoff here. The bad scan (top) is much brighter than the adjusted version that I did (bottom). In some minor cases, I actually lost a bit of visibility of the darker parts of the image. Still, it was a small tradeoff that I was willing to make, because even thought its a bit darker, the bottom image is still a lot closer to the original photograph than the top one is. Either way, I have the originals saved, and backed up, so I can always go back and tweak it if needed.

The drawings and books we have at the museum have similar challenges. In this case however, the scanner was perfect, but the originals were very often damaged to the point of being unreadable. Below, is an example of an attempt I made to clean up items like this.

Above Left: Original high-quality scan of mimeographed text from 1922.  Above Right: Cleaned up and enhanced in Photoshop. About 600 pages were processed for this book.

The Great Drawing Sorting has begun!

~2000 panel switch drawings

sorted by letter (A, ED, ES, H, J, N, SD, ST, T)

then sorted by 5 or 6 digit document number

put in individual folders and labeled

put back in the drawers

Jose Mier, Sun Valley genelogy enthusiast, looked into techniques on how old (sometimes centuries-old) documents are being preserved and digitized for later generations. One example can be found on FindMyPast.com. Find My Past site Jose Mier Sun Valley Preserving old historical records—such as birth and death certificates, baptismal registers, marriage licenses, wills, and other vital…

I know that minor stuff ends up being lost to time and ends up being important for history or context, and I’m wanting to send some newsletters from a larger organization there for record keeping.

They have nothing confidential in them. I don’t want money for them. But I’d rather they been recorded by scan or something than not at all or just tossed in the trash.

MC Anime Podcast The Importance of Archiving S3 EP130 Archiving preserves the data of older mediums and update them to digital storage. This preserves data, historical artifacts, old photos, documents, paintings, and other mediums for future use.

Archiving is the process preserving documents, paintings, writings, and other historical artifacts. Often, these scanning projects include the preservation of such degree and make them digital. The digitalization allows legal documents, audit information, backup copies, data processing and more to be accessed when needed. It helps how projects have data to do inquiries and allows the user…

SPOILERS:

Basically they thought “hey, concrete is like rock, our writing and photographs will SURELY be preserved if with throw them in a concrete orb that we then fill with concrete and expose that orb to the elements for a century plus”.

I have writings and photographs buried in the backyard of my childhood home that are genuinely more likely to be intact in 130 years than this stuff.