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An Illustrated History |
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An Illustrated History |
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Project description:
This project entitled "Mainstreaming Digital Imaging: Missouri Botanical Garden" was funded by a Missouri State Library Digital Imaging Grant.
We began work in February of 2002 and completed the initial phase by September 2002. We plan to continue to add images to this database into the future. In the course of daily operations in our Archive, we generate many digital images from our image collections. In the past, these were scanned as needed and only to the specifications required for a particular use or publication request. As a result, we had hundreds of digital files with no naming conventions or scanning standards. The goal of this project was to develop a database, procedures and standards, which would provide a quality repository into which these images can be placed for recurring use. The development of this system has allowed us to "mainstream" digitization into our daily operations. We have created a core database (or digital filing cabinet) to which we will continue to add images as they are created. During the grant period, we populated this database with more than 500 images and their associated metadata. This database not only provides a system for internal standardization and management of digital images, but allows us to make the images through the World Wide Web. As a result, the users may see some of our working data as opposed to a polished set of information used exclusively for web display. As a demonstration project to show the practical use of a digital image repository we also created a web page entitled "An Illustrated History of Missouri Botanical Garden." This is an interactive timeline using images from our digital image repository. This content of this page was directed at a general "K to Gray" audience and provides a valuable addition to our current Missouri Botanical Garden web page. Scope and Content: The image collection in the Missouri Botanical Garden Archives contains approximately 15,000 images, ranging in date from 1850 through the present. They include modern and historic gardens, architecture, scientific explorations and variety of other subjects. Because of Missouri Botanical Garden’s age, and worldwide reputation, these images are of local, national and international significance. The collection contains a variety of formats including glass plate negatives, magic lantern slides, stereo-view prints, photographic prints, postcards and 35 mm slides. We have concentrated our initial efforts on our 19th and early 20th century images but over time will add images from all time periods, including contemporary. When presenting the digital versions of our images we were confronted with questions regarding the extent of editing to be conducted. The original high resolution TIFF images (see below for specifications) were stored in their unedited form on CD-ROM. The images used for web display were edited to improve the overall quality. This correction was limited to color correction and contrast. A decision was made to present the images as historical artifacts by not correcting defects of the original media. Jagged edges of glass negatives were not cropped. Speckles, cracks, stains and other imperfections were not retouched. Project Contributors: Andrew Colligan, Archivist for the Garden, was responsible for content selection, scanning of images, and providing image descriptions. Andrew also supervised various aspects of the project including content, database migration, and image quality standards. Chris Freeland was responsible for web design, display, ASP programming, and project development. Doug Holland acted in the capacity of project management supervisor overseeing grant funding and project development. Wendy Westmoreland assisted in the scanning of images, editing, and creating derivative images for the web site. Joe Ditto assisted in database creation, migration, and implementation. Kent Bunting provided the written history for the main web page and time line. Fred Keusenkothen assisted in the scanning of oversize materials. Leslie Miller assisted in image editing and color correction for web display. Equipment and Software Used: Computer:
Scanner:
Digital overhead camera:
Software:
Digital Image Standards: The digital images captured for the Illustrated History of the Missouri Botanical Garden were created using a minimum standard of providing 3000 pixels per edge. All scanning and image capture was completed in house on the grounds of the Missouri Botanical Garden. Depending on actual size of the physical original file sizes ranged from 50MB to 100MB in size. Only in the case of slides did these figures not apply. Scanning of images was performed using 24-bit color and resolution of images ranged from 650 dpi to 1600 dpi. All images were saved as TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) files, which were burned to the CD-R format. These digital masters were then viewed in Adobe Photoshop to adjust image for proper web display and to create thumbnail and full size derivatives in the JPEG file format. Once completed, the corrected originals were also saved in the MrSID file compression format for detailed web display. General specifications for digital images:
Specifications for Glass Plate Negatives:
Specifications for Magic Lantern Slides:
Specifications for Photographs:
Specification for 35mm Color Slides:
Web Display: Metadata about the Archives' image collection is stored in a Microsoft Access database with custom fields. For the purpose of this project, the records for the digitized images were exported out of the Archives database and into an Access database on our web server. This image database contains fields that correspond to the 15 Dublin Core elements. Active Server Page scripts were written to dynamically extract data from the database and format it for display on the web. A version of our database is available for download. Use of Dublin Core in this project: The metadata which populates the on-line image database was extracted from our larger off-line image database. As images are digitized this will be recorded in the offline database. Records associated with the digitized images are then exported from the offline to the online database. During this process the off-line field names are mapped to Dublin Core elements. Below are descriptions of our interpretation and use of Dublin Core tags. -Title: Used for a short title. It is generally used for an exact transcription of the title as written on the original media, if available. -Creator: Original photographer or creator of image -Subject: Our subjects headings are extracted from a thesaurus developed specifically for the Missouri Botanical Garden Archives. This local authority file provides us with finely grained distinctions between gardens, landscape features and buildings within our institution over time. Some subjects have an (MBG) suffix, (representing "Missouri Botanical Garden") to indicate an object associated specifically with Missouri Botanical Garden. For example this distinguishes a generic "Visitors" subject from "Visitors to Missouri Botanical Garden" This convention was adopted because the vast majority of our subjects would be prefaced by "Missouri Botanical Garden-" if we followed Library of Congress Subject headings. We found our method more convenient for local use, not anticipating that they would be used outside of our institutional setting. We hope to add Library of Congress Subject Headings to provide standardized access points. -Relation: This field indicates the original form of the media using a local system of abbreviations used in our accession numbering procedure.
-Description: This is a unrestricted field for describing any aspect of the image, including but not limited to, people or items represented in the image, accession numbers of other similar images found within the Missouri Botanical Garden collection and general notes of interest. -Publisher: Missouri Botanical Garden -Contributor: Missouri Botanical Garden -Date of original: This date is taken from the original media if available, or if approximated, this in indicated to be "circa." -Date scanned: The date this image was digitized at the Missouri Botanical Garden. -Type: Image. -Format: Archival image digital format -Identifier: Missouri Botanical Garden Archives accession number. -Source: Description of media of original image. -Language: Currently not being used. -Coverage: Currently not being used. -Rights: A link to our copyright policy. -Width of original: Dimensions of original image media -Height of original: Dimensions of original image media |