Digitization from the Ground Up

Digital Imaging for Historic New England’s Collections Access Project

VRA 2013, Providence, R.I.David M. Dwiggins, Information Technology Officerddwiggins@historicnewengland.org

We serve the public by preserving and presenting New England heritage.

Historic New England is a museum of cultural history that collects and preserves buildings, landscapes, and objects dating from the

seventeenth century to the present and uses them to keep history alive and to help people develop a deeper understanding and

enjoyment of New England life and appreciation for its preservation.

Historic New England’s mission

• Historic Properties• Collections• Preservation Services• Education• Library and Archives

5 program areas

Collections Access Project

• Multi-year, grant funded effort to enhance public availability of collections– New collections system– Large-scale digitization– New website

• Key goal: integration of museum, library, & archival collections

CAP grant on digitization

• “Historic New England will undertake the digitization of highlights in its library, archives and artifact collections, and link them to cataloguing records.”– 15,000 color slides– 2,500 4x5 color transparencies– 7,500 original historic photographs– 5,000 oversized archival objects

• “Projected costs for digitization are determined from actual per-image charges from trusted vendors currently engaged for Historic New England work.”

Image selection• Mix of archival and museum materials (no

book digitization)• Representative sample of collection• “low hanging fruit”

– Existing imagery– Homogenous groups of content

Existing Imagery

20,000+ existing digital images of collections identified before digitization even started (!!!)

Transparencies

• Around 2,700 transparencies scanned by outside vendor (in Boston)

Museum Object Prints

Glass Plate Transit Negatives• From microfilm to digital files (vendor in Boston)

Data Cleanup: Boston Transit Collection

The case for “do it yourself” photography

• Less movement of materials• Easier to deal with complex

collections– Reduced need for detailed

manifests, shipping, scheduling, etc.

• Meet day-to-day digitization needs• Build internal expertise– Creation of grant-funded

digital photographer position

In-house publication photography

Getting started with object photography

• Worked extensively with Michael Ulsaker of Ulsaker Studios– Studio planning– Installation– Training– Support

We used to do plenty of photography internally…

But had gotten out of the habit

First Harrison Gray Otis House, 1796

Technology in historic buildings, part I

Technology in historic buildings, part II

Equipment

• Canon EOS 5D Mark II Camera (21MP)• 50mm and 120mm lenses• Broncolor strobe system• Integrated light table• Polaroid MP4 column• Black cloth panel overhead to reduce

reflections• Apple iMac

– EOS Capture utility– Adobe Lightroom– Adobe Photoshop

Finished setup

In-situ digitization for museum objects

Still outsourced: Slides

• ~1,400+ slides of collection objects scanned by outside vendor (in India)

Ok, that worked… What about oversize materials?

Haverhill photo studio

Collections Storage in Haverhill

Goal: update photo studio for digital

• Shoot 5,000 oversized pieces internally• Allow reuse of equipment for other

digitization projects• Do it with money we had left (about $50k)– Started out trying to reuse equipment

from film days; only partly successful

Final Haverhill equipment

• Hasselblad H3D-39MP (demo)• 50mm and 120mm Hasselblad lenses• Canon EOS 5D Mark II (primarily 3D objects)• Used studio stand• Refurbish existing Norman strobe system• Custom vacuum table• Motorized copy column• Additional lighting

accessories, carts, etc.• Mac Pro workstation

• “Completed” Haverhill studio

Digital Asset Management - ResourceSpace

• Collections Management System provided inadequate management of digital images and derivatives

• Implemented ResourceSpace as experimental stopgap.– Open source DAMs– Web-based PHP/MySQL

• Rapidly adopted as institution-wide solution

• We are a now a contributing developer– S3Sync Plugin– DeepZoom Plugin

Workflow

• Depends somewhat on project

• Strategy: Get images into DAMs ASAP, then use assigned ResourceIDs for identification

• Take advantage of embedded metadata and basic file naming to simplify bulk ingest

• For archival materials, we generally save TIFF, primary DNG, and verso image– XXX.tif– XXX_DNG.dng– XXX_verso.tif

• Occasionally pre-generate metadata in RS and then manually attach images

Import of embedded metadata

DAM/collections management integration

ResourceSpace

Minisis

Recent/upcoming

• Implementation of new strobes and workstation in Haverhill studio for IMLS wallpaper grant

• Rollout of new image features on website– Multiple images per object– DeepZoom to expose high-resolution

imagery• Considering use of JPEG 2000 to reduce

storage footprint• Looking at ways to improve DAMs metadata

Digitization from the Ground Up

Digital Imaging for Historic New England’s Collections Access Project

VRA 2013, Providence, R.I.David M. Dwiggins, Information Technology Officerddwiggins@historicnewengland.org