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Having Trouble Digitizing Your Collection? Meet Your Solution!

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What does your historical collection look like? Perhaps you have a box of bound manuscripts you’d like preserved for future generations, or maybe you have a library full of historic publications and loose papers that need organizing before you can even think about what the next steps are. The histories humans choose to save and share are vast and varied, and not every approach to digital preservation is going to be the right approach for your collection.

Collections of all shapes and sizes have come through Anderson Archival’s doors over the years. We’ve seen everything from re-processing poorly digitized collections to an oversized map from WWII. Some of our clients had a collection they knew they wanted digitized, but felt overwhelmed trying to start because of all the planning and physical work involved. If you have a bound paper collection that’s been sitting around for a decade and aren’t sure where to start, there are a few options available to you, including the solution of employing professional archivists to take the work out of your hands and get it done right.

Paging Through Paper Collections

Assessing the scope, time allotment, and potential snags beforehand can help your project run smoothly. For those tackling a smaller, loose paper collection, you may find a digitization solution under your own roof. If you own a combination printer/scanner, that may be enough to handle your loose papers. But scanning individual pages using a flatbed scanner is a more time-consuming process than many collectors expect it to be. It requires constant oversight and handling of the materials.

It may be tempting to utilize the auto-feed feature of a scanner for loose materials, but watch out for rips, snags, paper jams, and pages that are stuck together and not digitized. Auto-feeders should never be used for one-of-a-kind or fragile documents.

Collectors rightly expect their materials to be handled with the highest quality care standards when in the custody of a digital archivist.

Scanning bound materials is another matter altogether. Anyone who’s tried to scan a page of a book in a university or library setting knows how difficult it is to capture the entire page in an image—forget about trying to get an exact replica of a page using this method. Page scans will appear crooked, shadowed, blurry, or otherwise obscured by the limitations of a flatbed scanner.

For an accurate capture on a flatbed scanner, bound books would need to be split at the spine, damaging the original in order to capture high quality scans. Pressing books into a flatbed scanner is less risky in terms of damage to the book if the spine is well-bound, but often results in a lower-quality image. Fortunately, there is no need to resort to destructive methods of digitization. Alternate scanning technology is the best solution for collectors who have not digitized for fear of causing damage to their physical materials. You need not compromise the integrity of the original to preserve it.

Cradle Your Collection

A great addition to any digitization setup is a V-cradle scanner, which allows the capture of high-quality images with much less damage to the physical material compared to a traditional flatbed or auto-feeder scanner. A V-cradle scanner allows archivists to fully scan bound materials without splitting the book’s binding or damaging delicate originals.

These scanners, like all technology, vary in specifications and end results. The more elaborate and expensive scanners possess innovative constructions of cameras, lights, mechanical design, and image capture software. Full-spectrum light creates a reliable image that reflects the original exactly.

V-cradle scanners can boast superior image quality, robust software, and modular imaging technology that’s easily adaptable for materials with specific constraints. Any industry-grade scanners should be able to meet FADGI guidelines for quality images. The intuitively-shaped V-cradles come in a variety of sizes with adjustable settings and can support most standard-size books, enabling digitization of many kinds of books depending on the chosen cradle size. For institutions or archival companies who have this type of scanner, the power, specs, and flexibility open the door to a wider variety of project opportunities.

V-cradle scanners can boast superior image quality, robust software, and modular imaging technology that’s easily adaptable for materials with specific constraints.

Compare this system to that of the Afro-American’s Project Gado, which allows the newspaper to employ an efficient digitization process for their overwhelming amount of photographs saved over the years. Of course, a bespoke solution like Project Gado isn’t a feasible option for the individual collector who wants to digitize their bound materials, and neither is permanently damaging an entire collection just to make digital copies on a traditional scanner.

Collection Protection

Collectors rightly expect their materials to be handled with the highest quality care standards when in the custody of a digital archivist. The collections themselves need a safe and confidential storage area, especially for old or delicate materials susceptible to damage from environmental factors. Collectors often know from experience that storing materials in a damp basement or drafty attic will have an effect on paper materials, so an archival storage area free of mold, pests, and light pollution is essential.

Professional archivists have the space and knowledge to keep your collection as safe as possible during every step of the digitization process. They understand the storage needs of paper, which can be volatile depending on age and condition. They’re also trained in handling old or fragile materials, preventing accidents that may occur with less experienced collection custodians.

Investing in the right equipment, hours of organization and scanning, and the education required to process a collection the right way often isn’t feasible for individuals or busy organizations. Digitization professionals come with the right tools for the job. Reaching out for help from a firm with the right resources and know-how takes care of everything.

What does your bound collection need? Let Anderson Archival know how we can help fulfill your vision for your digitized collection! Call 314.259.1900 or complete a free consultation form to introduce your history to our solutions.

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Digitizing the Oldest Black Newspaper in America—One Photograph at a Time

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When John H. Murphy founded The Afro-American newspaper in 1892, his goal was to combine three separate church publications into a single-page newsletter. Murphy was both a former slave and a Civil War veteran, and in the Reconstruction era, The Afro-American served to inform and unite his Maryland community. Little did he know, it would become America’s oldest running black newspaper. By Murphy’s death in 1922, the newspaper had grown to cover most of the Atlantic coast and expanded to thirteen regional editions.

At its heart, The Afro-American (now simply Afro-American, or colloquially, Afro) was a mouthpiece for black America. It documented everyday life in black neighborhoods that the mainstream white media didn’t cover. Wedding and funeral announcements, neighborhood restoration projects, feats of black artists and athletes, and local community events could all be found in an issue of the Afro-American. The editorial section argued against Jim Crow machinations, discussed black labor rights, and highlighted education advocacy. The newspaper also gave a voice to aspiring black journalists, like Murphy’s own daughter Elizabeth Murphy Phillips Moss, who became America’s first black female reporter.

Murphy’s children continued the Afro-American’s important work. Fourth generation relatives John J. Oliver, Jr. and Frances M. Draper manage the paper today. It’s been a cornerstone in representing black journalistic voices in their own words and social groups. Media of the time tended to focus only on exceptional members of the black communities. Unless a black person was a celebrity of national renown, they were unlikely to catch the attention of mainstream news publications. The Afro-American was a way for a black child in Baltimore to pick up a newspaper and see stories of citizens and communities that looked like them.

There was a whole culture, a whole way of life that was ignored by American society. It didn’t exist but in the black press.”—Asantewa Boakyewa, an administrator in the Center for Africana Studies, Unboxing History

Preserving Everyday History: A Daunting Task

An institution as large and old as the Afro-American is bound to have a lot of source material stored, but the reality is almost beyond imagination. In 1923 the newspaper’s staff began actively storing every document, photograph, and letter used in the publication.

One approach to digital preservation is to focus solely on material with the highest research and revenue value. This would, in theory, limit the scope of the project to photographs of famous newsmakers and the articles with the most recognizable headlines.

However, such an approach would fly in the face of the Afro-American’s mission. From its inception, the newspaper held the lives and experiences of everyday citizens in high importance. A digital representation of the Afro-American wouldn’t be complete without advertisements, local births and deaths, letters from around town, and images of black people who aren’t already found in the historical canon. Everything was important to the Afro-American, and everything would need to be digitally preserved in order to keep the paper’s rounded picture of its time and community.

Nearly seventy years of bound broadsheets live in the Afro-American’s archives, which takes up seven rooms of the newspaper’s headquarters. Four of those rooms boast floor-to-ceiling shelves of hundreds of archival boxes, containing over 150,000 labeled envelopes stuffed with artifacts. File cabinets encase folders of photographs, each carefully annotated on onion skin pasted to the back of each photo. With no way to find a needed source easily, indexing would require digitization.

Digitizing a collection of this size and composition would prove the Afro-American’s biggest challenge.

Materials that old and delicate (like the onion skin annotations) need to be handled carefully, and the variety of media types meant that care and cost would be required in the effort. Manual digitization wouldn’t be as simple as feeding documents through a scanner. Sorting, categorizing, and deciding on metadata factors for the digital end product requires intense planning—something that’s much harder to do when a collection fills seven entire rooms.

Into The Future

Enter Thomas Smith, a graduate student and young programmer, and his invention, Project Gado. In 2010, Smith worked with the Afro-American to win grant funding for digitization, but even with money, the effort faced a daunting task.

The archives of the Afro-American contained 1.5 million historical photos. When approaching the project, Smith took stock of the collection. In his Medium article about the project, Smith writes, “The standard approach to scanning a commercial archive is to focus on the most valuable 1% to 2% of the collection. Almost invariably, this means capturing images that cover famous people and major events. The everyday, being less profitable, is left out.”

Smith’s vision? Use brand new technology to digitize everything.

He built Project Gado, a scanning robot which, by Smith’s estimation, would shrink scanning time and man hours. Gado works through Python and Arduino coding languages and operates by lightly suctioning photographs and placing them, one by one, on a scanner. Supervised by a human, the robot was able to scan about 120,000 images in the first year.

Additional Challenges & Earning a Profit

A virtual folder of raw image files is just as useful for research or revenue as a folder of photographs, but it can offer superior search capabilities when set up properly. This can save significant time and resources that can be allocated to more important tasks than sifting through boxes.

In order to make the Afro-American’s newly-digitized image collection searchable and sellable, Smith and the digitization team knew they would need to employ metadata. Adding information by hand was one option, but being a technical expert, Smith wanted to try powerful AI tools. In 2010-2012, this kind of technology was still in its earliest days when applied to visual media, so Smith’s team started building what they needed from scratch.

For the text, though, a major tool was Google Vision’s OCR. This tool detects when text appears in a document and then attempts to read it. This is an impressive tool, but has significant limits that can only be mitigated by detailed, human review. Check out the results in the Afro-American Archives.

AI tools created by IBM and trained by Smith’s team were also useful in identifying themes, content, and historical figures. Where the AI fell short was around gender and age. Even in today’s AI, facial recognition is largely ineffective when presented with people of color.

All that time and effort resulted in a product that could be sold to media marketplaces, like Getty Images. Now, licensing these powerful images helps fund the Afro-American’s reporting. These tools also helped move the field of preservation forward and displays just how useful deep learning and AI can be to the future of digitization.

The Impact of Everyday History

Smith pinpoints the incredible impact digitizing everyday black history creates. “That experience—that personal moment of interacting with the past—is a unique engagement with history that the archive offers.” This connection between the modern, everyday person and their counterpart in the past only comes when attention is paid not only to famous figures, but faces in the background. “Digitizing a whole archive (or at least a massive sample of it) affords the opportunity to capture both the iconic, highly profitable images and those that document daily experience,” says Smith.

Today, this wide-spread preservation of all perspectives and identities throughout history is more feasible than even ten years ago when the efforts to digitize the Afro-American began. According to Smith, “Modern scanning tech like the… overhead camera can scan hundreds of images per hour, and sheet-feed scanners today can scan delicate materials without damaging them. For institutions that can afford the tech, there’s no excuse not to digitize everything.”

Digitization of the Afro-American’s archives is ongoing, and presentation of its contents remains in flux, but organizations seeking similar results now have an amazing success story to look to for inspiration.

History’s raw materials, like fossils, are embedded in layers of time. Consider a drawer in your office desk or a hall bureau at home: Its jumbled contents form a visual collage of your recent past. History gets written when somebody sifts through the remains and ponders how all the pieces fit together.”—Bret McCabe, Unboxing History

Our histories, our cultures, and what makes us one human community—these concepts are more than items displayed in museums or on library shelves. Our stories wouldn’t be complete without the everyday lives of the community. The Afro-American’s massive historical collection of journalistic ephemera illustrates a rich history of a side of American life that is often missing from narratives.

Seemingly-ordinary collections are often the truest pictures of history. This ideology is part of Anderson Archival’s mission, just as it powers Project Gado and lives on in the Afro-American’s archives. If you’re ready to make sure that your collection is available for future generations and even for profit-earning, reach out to us today.

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“More to Be Told”: Finding the Right Fit for Your Private Collection

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It’s finally time! You’ve decided to preserve that collection of historical family artifacts you have boxed up and collecting dust. Maybe they’re a little water-stained or faded from sitting in your basement for a decade, or possibly you’re considering offering your collection to a larger audience once digitized. No matter the size or condition, your collection is important and deserves to be preserved.

Once you’ve developed the scope of your digitization plans, it’s time to make some decisions about how to proceed. Do you tackle the project on your own with equipment you already own? Do you find an archival firm that specializes in your kind of collection? As with any hiring process, it can sometimes be difficult to find the right fit in a partner that meets both your needs as the guardian of a collection and the needs of the collection itself.

When I first came into possession of [the journals] I thought, ‘Maybe this is something I can do on my own time. Maybe I can get a scanner.’”

Collection custodian Jim Surber found himself in a tough position when planning ahead for his digitization goals. “The collection’s been in my possession for about a year now,” says Surber. “I just wanted high quality images of the covers and the contents so they could be easily shared.”

The collection consisted of twenty-one bound journals given to Surber by an extended family member. The journals belonged to Surber’s great-grandfather, contained daily diary and travel entries ranging from years 1895 to 1925, and included a number of loose newspaper clippings. The journals themselves were each about the size of a small notebook, most of them no larger than 7” x 4”. Though some of the handwriting inside had faded significantly over the years, most of the materials had inked text that remained clear even after years in storage.

Despite being nearly a century old, most of the journals were in good structural condition. “[The collection] was stored in a house as far as I know,” says Surber, “probably just a box in the basement.” Storage is an important, oft-underestimated element of document preservation and can be a huge factor when it comes to the end condition. It’s rare that a collection stored in a basement is free of water or pest damage. This collection benefitted from not being overhandled, but the tradeoff of its diligent storage is that the information in the journals had never been carefully reviewed or studied.

Finding himself with a collection that was so important to him and his family, Surber began to explore his digitization options. “When I first came into possession of [the journals] I thought, ‘Maybe this is something I can do on my own time. Maybe I can get a scanner,’” says Surber. “Then I found out, ‘Wow, this is more involved than I thought it was. This is really going to take a lot of time, a lot of dedication.’”

Many caretakers of personal collections start out in the same position. The handling and imaging of delicate pages and bindings often don’t hold up well in the small flatbed printers most people have in their home offices. An archival firm has resources like cradle scanners and imaging software that would be impossible for the DIY digitizer to afford or access.

The Surber journals in particular presented an imaging challenge; the author had used as much of the page as possible in most of his entries, and the text reached the very edge of the inner margins on many of the pages. “I’d have to press [the journals] flat on a scanner, and not all of them should be pressed flat like that,” Surber recounts. “These are fragile and I don’t want to risk hurting them.” The narrow or, in some cases, nonexistent margins required a cradle scanner and careful maneuvering to capture the entire page. For historical artifacts like these journals, using a flatbed likely would have inflicted damage and provided incomplete scans, putting a frustrated collection owner back at square one.

If a collection requires the extra care and expertise that only an archivist can provide, what’s the appropriate next step? Finding a digitization partner that values a collection as much as the guardians do isn’t always an easy task.

Interested in learning more about what a digitization partner can do for your collection? Read about Historical Document Digitization.

“I called a couple [digitization firms] before I called Anderson Archival,” Surber says, “and it wasn’t really what they did. These companies basically told me, ‘I know what you’re getting at but it’s not really what we do.’” Surber’s collection was historically significant to him and his family, but the big digitization firms he reached out to weren’t willing to invest their time and expertise. “They just blew me off,” Surber recalls. “I wasn’t able to convince them it was worth their time.” Unless your collection is a truckload full of documents that can pushed quickly through a scanner with little or no processing, many digitization firms may not work with a private collection.

One benefit of family collection projects is that the audience connection is so much more immediate. Surber says, “My digging around the family history has led me to a lot of people my branches of family hadn’t been in contact with in many years. It’s interesting to hear people’s stories and reconnect with people.” In this way, Surber and Anderson Archival approach historical collections from the same perspective. “Everybody has a different story from those days, so we’re just trying to put it all together. It’s been so long but I think there’s more to be told.” Thankfully, Anderson Archival’s digital copies of the collection can facilitate that connection.

Not all collections are understood to be historically significant to the larger public, but just because they may never be viewed in a museum or gallery or aren’t easy to feed through a high-speed scanner, does not mean that they aren’t worth preserving. Digitization of family collections is important and necessary.

If your collection means a lot to you and you’d like it to be around forever so that anyone you choose can learn from and enjoy it, digitization might be the answer. Let Anderson Archival do the hard part for you. Contact us today!

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WWII Map Comes Home After 73 Years: Conservation and Digitization of a Soldier’s Legacy

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[Above: Anderson Archival’s digitized copy of the map displayed on a monitor with the original conserved map laid out on the table below.]

Working with historical documents means that Anderson Archival is privy to many valuable stories. The impact of these tales is often deeply personal as well as bearing a cultural impact. We recently completed work creating high resolution images to digitize an oversized World War II map. The global impact of this document is clear—one side of the map bears a narrative that tracks the movement of the 83rd Infantry Division from Normandy in June 1944 to Germany at the end of the war. The other, a detailed map, bears the signatures of the infantrymen it was gifted to, including the recent owner’s beloved father, S/Sgt Myron H. Miller.

But the personal impact doesn’t end there.

Founding Principal Amy Anderson recalls, “When I heard their story second hand, I just knew we had to write about it!” And thankfully, S/Sgt Miller’s children, Myra, Lynette, Marshall, Del, and Ken, were more than willing to share the incredible one-in-a-million tale of the map that made it back to their family “73 years later via a Frenchman.”

Anderson Archival: What do you know about your father’s involvement with the map?

The Miller Children: We know that the map was printed after the war ended as a gift to the soldiers of the 83rd Infantry Division in September 1945. It commemorated their service as a unit from Normandy, June 1944, to Zerbst, Germany, and the end of the war. With the fighting over, they had occupation duty as military police restoring order in Germany and Czechoslovakia.

Of the eleven buddies who signed the map, two joined Company K as replacements on the same day in July 1944 in Normandy—our father Myron H. Miller and James V. Cocola—and they ended the war together. Sgt. Hutchinson appears with them in a photo our dad saved. The others joined January 1945 and later. By those final days together they must have been very close.

Pfarrkirchen, Germany. Sunday, July 29, 1945. Sgt. Hutchinson and S/Sgt. Miller are on the left. Image used with permission.

AA: How did the Frenchman you reference come to be in possession of the map?

MC: Antoine Noslier, an expert on the history of the war in Brittany specializing in the 83rd Infantry Division, residing in St. Malo, France, purchased the map on eBay in 2011, about five years before meeting our family. He bought the map sight unseen because it was described to have original autographs on it.

Myra was advised to contact the expert Antoine for information as she was planning the family’s trip in 2016 to follow our dad’s footsteps through France, Belgium, and Germany. Antoine had been recommended as a reliable authority on military actions in Brittany. Myra, Ken, Del, and Marshall wanted to find the location in St. Malo (Brittany) where their father had pulled his wounded buddy out of the street after he had been hit by a sniper.

Just a few weeks prior to our arrival in St. Malo, Antoine was working on another project when he pulled out the map to check another name (James V. Cocola) that he remembered was on the map. His eyes landed on the name “S/Sgt Myron H. Miller, Dixon, Missouri” and he was amazed. He contacted Myra to confirm that our father was from Dixon, Missouri. Then he described the map he had—with our father’s signature. We were floored.

That summer, after we arrived in France and met Antoine, he took us into his kitchen—where he had the map spread out on his table. We took photos of the signature and sent them to our sister Lynette (who was not on the trip) to confirm the handwriting. She was 100% positive it was our father’s.

Then he described the map he had—with our father’s signature. We were floored.”

AA: What do you know about the process and reasoning behind returning the map to you?

MC: When Antoine showed the map to us, we were simply thrilled to see it and took many photos. We did not ask for the map from Antoine, as he had purchased it for research.

The following summer, Myra returned to St. Malo leading a Footsteps Researchers tour, and Antoine presented the map to her as a gift to the family. It was quite a gift. We are very grateful and thankful to have the map in the family.

Antoine Noslier presents the Miller children with the map. Left to Right: Myra Miller, Del Miller, Antoine Noslier, Marshall Miller, Ken Miller. Image used with permission.

AA: What plans do you have for the conserved map in the future?

MC: We have had the map professionally restored and preserved by NS Conservation in a frame that allows viewing of both sides.

We believe we have a valuable piece of World War II history and an heirloom to be displayed and treasured by the family. We will have replicas made from the digital copies to use for display at our speaking engagements and book signings with our new book Soldiers’ Stories: A Collection of WW2 Memoirs, Volume II, and with Footsteps Researchers. It is important that we stop further damage to the map and showcase our father’s signature and those of his buddies.

We also want to send a copy of the map to Antoine Noslier as a gift since he gave the original to us.

AA: What lead you to Noah Smutz/NS Conservation?

MC: Our family friend from Philadelphia, Robert “Bob” McNabb, searched the Internet for someone in St. Louis who could do a professional job. Bob’s father, James McNabb, fought with the 83rd Infantry Division, Company K, with our father, and he has a strong interest in World War II history. Bob called Noah secretly and got information, then he told me to call after he felt Noah was right for the job.

 

Smutz, in turn, directed the family to Anderson Archival for the creation of digital images. In addition to the work itself, we are grateful to Smutz, and to the children of S/Sgt Myron H. Miller, Dixon, Missouri, Company K, 331st Infantry, 83rd Infantry Division, for allowing us to be a part of this one-in-a-million story and to share it with our readers.

What family stories can Anderson Archival help you safequard? Contact us today for more information about how we can help you connect the dots and digitally preserve your family’s historical artifacts.

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Quotables: 6 Steps to Going Paperless in Light of COVID-19 (CEO Blog Nation)

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Founding Principal Amy Anderson’s post in CEO Blog Nation covers the basics of moving to a paperless office. This process can feel confusing or downright overwhelming, especially if you don’t know what your goals are or how to start.

Click here to read the full article!

Do you have a historical document collection that you’d like to make more accessible, relevant, and impactful? Anderson Archival uses proprietary methods to digitize collections so they are easily searchable, ultimately accessible, and even more meaningful to a wide audience. Let us help you preserve your legacy today! Give us a call at 314.259.1900 or email us at info@andersonarchival.com.

What are Quotables? This is a category in our posts to highlight any professional publications that benefit from our expert archivist experience and quote us in articles for their readers. 

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Quotables: 9 Ways Going Digital Can Increase Your Business’s Value (Home Business Mag)

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Farica Chang’s post in Home Business Mag outlines the benefits of digitizing a business.

Through proper digital preservation techniques, your scanned documents can contain metadata tagging, optical character recognition (OCR), and other tools to make your data easily searchable by anyone in your company. Quick search and reliable digital provenance are a boon to all aspects of your business. This includes maintaining brand authenticity, and storytelling to product innovation, and to legal and compliance support.

Click here to read the full article!

Do you have a historical document collection that you’d like to make more accessible, relevant, and impactful? Anderson Archival uses proprietary methods to digitize collections so they are easily searchable, ultimately accessible, and even more meaningful to a wide audience. Let us help you preserve your legacy today! Give us a call at 314.259.1900 or email us at info@andersonarchival.com.

What are Quotables? This is a category in our posts to highlight any professional publications that benefit from our expert archivist experience and quote us in articles for their readers. 

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Quotables: 5 Steps for Organizing Your Paperless Office (Young Upstarts)

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Principal Farica Chang’s guest blog for Young Upstarts stresses the importance of planning and security when moving to a paperless office—or starting an archival project.

Some questions to help direct your planning stage are the following:

What exactly do you want to digitize? Which physical copies will be shredded and what will be preserved? What do you want the digital folder hierarchy to look like? Are you going to scan in-house or outsource the job?

Click here to read the full article!

Do you have a historical document collection that you’d like to make more accessible, relevant, and impactful? Anderson Archival uses proprietary methods to digitize collections so they are easily searchable, ultimately accessible, and even more meaningful to a wide audience. Let us help you preserve your legacy today! Give us a call at 314.259.1900 or email us at info@andersonarchival.com.

What are Quotables? This is a category in our posts to highlight any professional publications that benefit from our expert archivist experience and quote us in articles for their readers. 

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Quotables: Digital Archives (Grit Daily)

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Principal Farica Chang shared the importance of digitizing your “docs and pics” with Grit Daily.

While you might not have an original draft of the Declaration of Independence lying around, your collection—whether it contains historical newspapers or your grandparents’ letters from the war—has value to you and to the future.

Click here to read the full article!

Do you have a historical document collection that you’d like to make more accessible, relevant, and impactful? Anderson Archival uses proprietary methods to digitize collections so they are easily searchable, ultimately accessible, and even more meaningful to a wide audience. Let us help you preserve your legacy today! Give us a call at 314.259.1900 or email us at info@andersonarchival.com.

What are Quotables? This is a category in our posts to highlight any professional publications that benefit from our expert archivist experience and quote us in articles for their readers. 

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5 Factors That Can Affect the Timeframe of Your Archival Project

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Is it finally time to kick off that digitization project you’ve been delaying for so long?

Many collectors don’t realize how much time and planning go into digitizing a box of old photo albums, let alone a collection that fills an entire room or basement. If you’re applying for funding to help your or your organization’s rainy day dream become reality, you’ll need to have some idea of the amount of time it will take to do it right.

How much time should you plan to spend digitizing before you see the end result? Or, more likely, how long should you expect your archival team to keep and analyze your collection until you have the final digitized project in your hand?

A quality archival company is well-versed in the variables that affect the time it takes to see your project through to the end. Doing it right the first time is going to take more time than a lower-quality job that will need to be re-done in a few years. Every collection has its own needs, quirks, and significance. Here are four of the most common factors that determine how long it will take to complete your digitization project.

  1. Handling and Scanning Materials

The time it takes to physically process the individual materials in your collection is an important factor to consider. The size and composition of the collection determine how the materials should be handled at every point in the process. Unless you work in-house, your collection will need to be transported to the scanning facilities (and eventually back to you).

Historical paper documents, especially those severely damaged or suffering from acid deterioration, require the gentlest touch at every step of the project.

Once in-house, a trained team carefully categorizes each document and prepares it for scanning, which may include a page-by-page examination to note any handwriting marks, rips, or smudges. This process can take hours or weeks to complete, depending on the breadth of your collection.

Scanning the materials is also a much more delicate task than one might think. Unlike an amateur photo album scanning job, professional archival scanning goes beyond slapping a document into a home/office scanner bed and calling it a day. An archivist must observe each page that feeds through the enterprise-grade scanner, taking care to prevent any wrinkles or jams before they occur and damage the original. Bound collections require specialized scanning cradles that photograph pages while preserving the binding and delicate materials that would otherwise be destroyed in a traditional scanner.

  1. Image Cleanup

Once your collection is scanned, the real digital work begins! Historical documents almost always have some sort of blemish; changes in paper quality and printing standards are to thank for that. While copies of the original image can be kept, it is useful to have working copies that can be adjusted for maximum use by the end user. In order to get the cleanest possible result—and fewer headaches during the proofing process—the newly-digitized images are combed over and cleaned in a graphic editing program.

Depending of the needs of the project, archivists can simply erase speckles or splotches that would interrupt the proofing process or perform character or full-text replacements for missing or damaged sections of text. Document age, page size, image resolution, scan quality, and level of adherence to the original material need to be considered to accurately calculate the length of time needed for this step. Not all collections need or want this step, but it’s often necessary for the longevity and use of the final product.

  1. OCR and Proofing

Optical character recognition (OCR) is an essential part of most digitization projects and  cannot be rushed. Being patient during the image cleanup steps pays off by providing cleaner images to process during OCR. Proofing relies on both human and digital eyes, a partnership that can sometimes prove time-consuming.

Older texts often use outdated language and fonts, which can confuse modern text recognition programs.

The human archivists on the other side of the screen inspect any flagged letters or symbols and compare to the original text to confirm accuracy.

With trickier collections, or those needing a character-for-character replication of the original, additional human-eye passes may be needed for precision of detail. Rare cases could require spoken or audio passes, which can add a significant chunk of time to the project duration, but also greatly enhance the quality of the end product.

  1. Tagging and Organization

Building search features into a collection is a lengthy process, but necessary for any collection that may one day be used for study or research. This is accomplished by tagging a document’s metadata during the digitization process. By marking authors, dates, and section types, users can not only search a text for exact keywords but also for these specific features.

Formatting your collection is more than the “finishing touches” it implies. You as the collector will need to reflect on what you want your end product to look like. How will you use it? How will your target audience?

Even collectors who just want digital image replications of their collection cannot ignore this step. The Library of Congress outlines the sustainability of digital formats, so you can ensure the time you’ve invested in this project won’t have to repeated in the future.

  1. Context of Collection

Okay, okay—so this isn’t really a timeframe factor as much as it is one of the proprietary values Anderson Archival infuses into every digitization project that comes through our doors.

But it is an absolutely crucial one when it comes to doing it right the first time. We’ve written before about how much time gets wasted by improper digitization strategies. Understanding the full cultural, historical, and personal context of your collection guarantees success in every step of the process.

It takes knowing everything possible about the collection to catch pages missed during the scanning or find a misprint of an author’s name during proofing. Realizing a step too late that an entire chapter of a document is missing from your copy and a replacement needs to be found could set the project back. The extra time it takes to understand your collection pay big dividends in the end.

 

Anderson Archival is dedicated to turning your collection into a usable digitized archive—no matter how much detail is involved. To discuss the timeframe of your next digitization project, contact us today!

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Transcription from the Crowd: Three Success Stories

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The cost of paying for expert text recognition, proofreading, and quality assurance do not need to be prohibitory barriers to the completion of a digital library, recent stories show.

Projects ranging from preserving digital records of the stars to documenting the civil rights and suffrage movements have employed volunteers to transcribe historical documents. Whether dedicated researchers with a vested interest in the final product or a stranger offering a moment of time and effort, volunteer transcribers provide an essential service that ensures collections are accessible and searchable without a huge price tag.

Crowdsourcing volunteers is not new, not even for transcription work. Since 2012, the National Archives’ Citizen Archivist program has utilized a nearly unlimited workforce of internet users to transcribe historical documents, add metadata tags, and review changes made by other volunteers.

Part of what Anderson Archival offers is the integrity of treating your collection as our own – and for some collections, crowdsourcing the text recognition process can be an incredible solution to a lack of funding, or desire to involve the public.

Three such crowdsourced digitization and transcription projects already prove the capabilities of a large group of volunteers.

Involving specially-trained volunteers in some cases or strangers around the world also directly ties the public to the welfare of the collection.

Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard (DASCH)

Not long ago, Anderson Archival wrote about the digitization of this spectacular collection. Since 2014, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has asked digital volunteers for help transcribing material related to Harvard observatory’s glass plates. This collection, known as Project PHaEDRA, includes logbooks and findings related to the DASCH glass plates analyzed by notable women in science history, such as Williamina Fleming, Annie Jump Cannon, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, and Antonia Maura.

Transcription will allow the collection to be fully text-searchable and provides crucial contextual data about the 500,000 glass plate photographs of the night sky taken from 1885 to 1992. Without transcription of these data sets, accurate digital modeling of the scanned plates is not possible.

The collection of glass plates along with notebooks of findings will provide an incredible look at the history of our sky and of astronomy.

#TranscribeBond with University of Virginia

In August of 2018, and again in 2019, residents of Charlottesville, the University of Virginia, and digital volunteers met for a “transcribe-a-thon” of civil rights activist Julian Bond’s writings. Previously, the papers were available only to students in person at the university library, but digitization efforts aim to make this collection available online.

Transcription efforts for this collection are ongoing. Digital volunteers can join the work at From the Page. At the time of this posting, more than three thousand of the 7,797 pages of Bond’s writings are transcribed.

The Library of Congress: By the People

The Library of Congress’ By the People project proves that a few minutes of your time can impact future historical research and reference. By the People was launched in 2018, and collections relating to Abraham Lincoln, women’s suffrage, and the Civil War continue to be featured.

The digitization and transcription of these collections mean that countless pages will be available digitally and fully searchable for the first time, ensuring that the history they contain is accessible to all.

For volunteers fascinated with history, By the People has enough variety to keep anyone entertained and learning while they transcribe.

Crowdsourcing Saves Costs and Enriches the World

A solution like one of these might be possible for your collection. The cost of expert handwriting transcription, proofreading, and quality assurance may feel too high for some collection owners. A volunteer workforce can save money when this is the case!

Involving specially-trained volunteers in some cases or strangers around the world also directly ties the public to the welfare of the collection.

Crowdsourcing does have its downsides. As illustrated by the three examples above, even with millions of potential volunteers, the time taken to process documents greatly increases. In addition, a digital transcription framework may need to be purchased or developed. If a digitization project has limits on timeframe, or if leaving the accuracy of your collection to the public is a concern, crowdsourcing may not be right for you.

As with any project involving the public, your success may vary, and this is something to consider in the planning process, but crowdsourcing transcription provides an interesting alternative to the traditional model.

 

Anderson Archival provides all aspects of historical document digitization, including expert transcription, proofreading, and quality assurance. Are you looking for a digitization company that will treat your collection as their own? Contact Anderson Archival today.

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