By: Madeline Moison
Madeline Moison (Archives Track, '19) spearheaded a digitization initiative for an archival institution in Boston during the summer of 2018. In this blog post, she shares some of what she learned with her peers at UMass Boston and beyond.
Today archival documents, images, and film are being digitized more and more for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, documents are just too fragile to be handled frequently, or they hold great value to researchers around the world, or they’re so valuable they need to be digitized to make sure a copy of the document exists somewhere. Whatever the reason for digitization, institutions often choose to hire part-time or term archival workers to carry out this work. Graduate students in archives programs, like the one at UMass Boston, might find themselves hired for this kind of work, and tasked with digitizing a collection over the course of a semester or term.
This can be daunting for someone who doesn’t know a thing about cameras, editing software, or image file types. It’s no substitute for training, or for reviewing relevant manuals, but here are ten tips and tricks for students approaching digitization for the first time:
(#1)
A lot can be said about the right camera for the job. Not every camera will work for digitization. Depending on what the end goal of the project is you’ll have to find the camera and editing software that works for you. But for the most part you will be shooting images in RAW. RAW is a type of file like the all familiar JPEG. JPEG won’t work for this sort of work, because the images shot in JPEG are compressed versions of what the camera “sees”. This is great for a lot of photos of your beach vacation (when you don’t care about quality as much as you care about quantity). However, when it comes to digitizing, your priorities are a little different. RAW files are uncompressed, so essentially everything the camera “sees” is saved as is. These are wildly large files– so watch out!
(#2)
Why shoot in RAW anyway? Well, because RAW images show everything the camera “sees,” they are extremely detailed. The level of detail allows you to zoom in on the image and avoid the fuzziness that can happen when you zoom in on JPEG images. The closer you can get to capturing the original document in that photo the better.
(#3)
Bring headphones! You will be left alone to your own devices for hours at a time with just the large stack of papers, photos, and books you are digitizing. I would recommend downloading a few good history podcasts or maybe a true crime one to keep you on your toes in the quiet of the archive.
(#4)
Back up everything! I can’t say that enough. Who do you think you are not saving anything in multiple places? Getting a portable drive can be expensive– but you can even get some 64 GB flash drives. If you’re feeling high-tech, take the two minutes to get a Drobox account to store stuff, too. A word of warning: if Terminator has taught us anything, it’s not to trust those pesky robots. So, keep a hard copy of everything you do on any type of external drive anyway. Don’t fall prey to Skynet; they want you to lose access to the precious bits of human history you’re digitizing for future generations.
(#5)
What to do with these files now that you have them? Odds are these files look rough. You’ll need to edit them. It’s not as daunting as it sounds. You can get a Photoshop monthly subscription for as little as 10 dollars a month that should cover all your needs. I won’t explain the details of Photoshop to you here, but you can watch a few YouTube tutorials and in no time, you’ll be a pro. Lightroom CC is a type of Photoshop that is extremely user friendly when it comes to photo editing and is what I would recommend starting with. The main tools you’ll probably end up using in Lightroom are clarity, dehaze, temperature, and sharpening. They all do what it sounds like they do, but temperature is a key one. Using the temperature gage, you can adjust the yellowy tint your paper documents may have picked up in non-ideal lighting situations by adding the slightest touches of blue to the image. A word of warning: don’t edit the images too much. You can end up with a much grainier version of the image than you expected.
(#6)
Have two copies at least of those RAW photos you took. You shouldn’t be editing the only copy you have.
(#7)
Pack a good lunch. You’ll work up an appetite turning pages and taking photos. There is nothing worse than a deadly quiet reading room filled only by the sounds of your angry stomach. I’d recommend a lovely quinoa salad with pickled onions with a side of strawberries and Cheeze-its.
(#8)
Now that your images are looking edited and beautiful you can convert the RAW images into a different file format. TIFF is a good bet, but it all depends on the end results you and your archive are looking for. TIFF files are a sort of in-between option of RAW and JPEG files. TIFF images are slightly compressed but still retain a lot of detail, so they’re perfect for uploading to the internet. Everyone’s computer can handle opening a large number of TIFF sized images, but if you tried to work with many RAW images things would get very slow very quickly. You can buy a RAW to Tiff converter on the internet, or you can change them in Photoshop.
Now, I bet you’re wondering why I told you to shoot in RAW if it was just going to be turned into a TIFF image anyway. Well, you can shoot images in TIFF format, but the cameras that can do that are very expensive. If you have access to one go for it, but I’m assuming you don’t have a 3,000 dollar camera lying around.
(#9)
If you can, take the time to get to know the staff of the archive or repository you’re spending all this time in now. Odds are you’re an outside contractor doing a job funded by a grant and are new to the building. Talk about that cool new true crime podcast you just downloaded. If you already work at this place then it’s still good practice to know your coworkers, so get to it! It never hurts to network, especially if you’re going to be entering the job market soon!
(#10)
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: