Skip to main content

Decision to scan from microfilm vs. original newsprint, Kent Stater project

Over the summer, we completed the monumental task of digitizing over 90 years of the student newspaper at Kent State. In the last batch of materials that were ingested (1926-1939), we had to make a decision whether to send out the originals- slim, bound volumes- or, to scan from microfilm. All of the previous scanning had been done from the print. We send the full volumes out to our vendor (Backstage Library Works), who disbinds the content before scanning (Note: this is from our second copy, for anyone who is curious! I also love that the disbinding machine is called the guillotine).

These early volumes were more problematic however, so our team talked about other options. As we looked at the early years, the newspaper had become extremely brittle, so much that even turning the pages to review the volumes was a little harrowing. We had to really tackle the potential problems for the scanning vendor before we decided whether to send these out. The level of brittleness in these early years was enough that we did not think the regular guillotine method would be a good idea. There were also a number of torn pages and missing pieces that would have to be addressed and if possible, repaired.

We then turned to the micofilm copy. These had been done some years prior, and to the best of our knowledge, had been filmed in-house. This option also presented its own set of problems as well- Since this was done in-house, we noted some skipped pages throughout the reels, and at times, low quality capture (hot spots in lighting, bad contrast, etc.). However, using our new microfilm reader/scanner, we noted that since the capture had taken place at an earlier date when the paper was less brittle, the quality was overall better than what we would likely get from capturing the physical volumes. And, another selling point was that the decision to scan from the microfilm instead of the physical volumes with numerous preservation issues, it was also much cheaper.

So, we sent out the microfilm, and I had the not so fun job of going through the scans to determine the missing pages. Fortunately, with our file naming schema in place, I did have some clues along the way to identify the missing pages. I did however end up doing a page level review, since we had noted the capture problems (lighting/contrast) in our initial review. All I will say, is that lots and lots of coffee was ingested during this tedious review. Once I had a list, we scanned the missing/low quality pages in-house from the brittle originals. We used our Bookeye 4 scanner to make the capture. These new scans were then added to the scans from Backstage, and these were sent on to the encoding vendor. Even though the number of issues from the early years were significantly lower than later years, this was a pretty tedious chore that took me about four weeks to complete in the late spring/early summer of 2017. (Only 3,254 pages from thirteen years of publication...)

I thought this topic might be of use for folks in the same scenario, and here's a link to our first issue of the student newspaper. At that time, called The Searchlight:::


https://dks.library.kent.edu/cgi-bin/kentstate?a=d&d=sea19260225-01&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN------- 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Summertime

It's funny when you work in academics, and so many people assume you have summers off. Summers end up being the busiest time of the year for me for a few reasons. I may have less meetings with the 9 month contract faculty, but it's high time for projects. I normally have students who can work more hours, and that in turns means more time from me to keep things running. This summer I have been working closely with the Kent Historical Society on a project to get their oral history collection online, over the past three years or so using interns from the Library Science program at KSU. We finally got the first batch up, after alot of work to capture and transfer digital files, make content descriptions and also work on transcriptions. Here's the link to the collection at Ohio Memory: http://www.ohiomemory.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/p16007coll83  It's been amazing to work with the historical society- Alot of names that are familiar to me being a Kent native, and

Choose Privacy Every Day blog

I realized this week that I had not posted here in some time! Lots of reasons- many of which are not terribly exciting- feeling overwhelmed/busy/stressed, being a FT working mom with twins who just started kindergarten, pandemic, blah, blah, blah, but I have also been writing a monthly blog post for the ALA Choose Privacy Every Day blog. https://chooseprivacyeveryday.org/author/virginia-dressler/  This has been a super rewarding experience- I get to pick the topic, and lately it's been mostly interviewing current privacy and AI grant PIs and book reviews. Check it out, and if you feel the urge, you can subscribe on the homepage . I will post some job related project updates here shortly!   "robots" by Tarkowski is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Tenure track, twins and prenatal loss

Life of late has been crazy busy. Technically the tenure clock is paused this year as I toll, yet the 2 year NHRPC  grant kicked off last September as I returned from maternity leave, and I continue to make a stab at research and writing in the interim. But my life has changed quite a bit (and as such, the intermittent absence of the blog). We welcomed twins last May, who are currently inches away from walking and continue to keep me on my toes in a daily whirlwind of activity. They came into this world exactly a year and a day after our devastating full term loss in 2015. Life is strange and odd, and often I find that I am still reeling when I think about the unexplained loss of our first. It has been difficult to move on, and feel a huge part of my heart remains with that baby. There are constant reminders- friends who had successful births around the same time remind me of the huge, gaping hole in our lives when I see their little one, or walking by the tree my amazingly thought