Hi Melanie,

Here at the Connecticut State Library we digitize images and manuscript documents with a variety of equipment, including flatbed scanners and high end DSLR cameras. Prolonged light exposure can affect images and documents, but scanning once is not going to do it. It is the handling of the materials that can be more damaging. Things like the oils from your fingers can damage the emulsion on old photographs so wearing cotton or nitrile gloves as Matt had suggested will minimize the risk.

As for scanning, if this is meant to be a digital archive, scanning as a TIFF is a must. JPEGs are lossy and can easily degrade and JPEG2000 lacks support from browsers and many scanners making it a difficult format to work with. Cornell has an online tutorial on digital imaging<http://www.library.cornell.edu/preservation/tutorial/contents.html>, its a bit technical, but definitely worth the time. One thing to be aware of is that TIFFs will produce large file sizes, especially at higher resolutions (which should be no less than 300ppi), so be sure to allocate the space to store them. Backing them up on a portable hard drive and/or the cloud is also a good idea (Google now offers 5GB for free through Google Drive<https://drive.google.com/start#home>).

A note on film-scanners - There are very few really good dedicated film scanners out there and they are expensive. The Plustek OpticFilm<http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/search?atclk=Brand_Plustek&ci=1151&N=4277366338+4268641670> series are not bad but they are a bit pricey. The cheaper ones do not offer high enough resolution to create archival quality tiffs. While they claim to scan up to 3600ppi or higher, this is an interpolated resolution, meaning the software performs a calculation to make up the extra pixels. It is the optical resolution that is important and this is usually no higher than 1800ppi in the cheaper models. For good film scans you want at least 2000ppi. A flatbed with the capability of scanning film is a great alternative especially since when you are done scanning your film, you still have a usable flatbed for scanning photos and documents. If you want to go with a dedicated film scanner, try to find an old Plustek or Nikon on ebay.

We use Epson Expression 10000XL's here and they work wonderfully, but they are expensive. I would recommend the Epson Perfection V300 or V500 which are great low cost scanners that scan film as well. The software that comes with the Epson will allow for some tonal corrections, but if you have the money, investing in SilverFast<http://www.silverfast.com/> or VueScan<http://hamrick.com/> scanning software can help produce better scans with less need for post-processing.

For materials that don't easily fit onto a scanner bed, an inexpensive imaging set up can be made with a digital camera, tripod and some work lamps with daylight balanced bulbs (5600k).

You also have to think about what to do with all these digital files once you've got them, Metadata is the most important piece of managing these files and a few of the sites that others have mentioned will help you with this. ControlledVocabulary <http://www.controlledvocabulary.com/imagedatabases/> is a great site with some good info about image management and creating metadata. There's also a link<http://www.controlledvocabulary.com/imagedatabases/programs.html>  there to some great software tools that will help organize the images and create metadata to aid in making the archive searchable. This is really important if your father-in-law wants to make the archive available to the public. Omeka<http://www.omeka.net/> is a wonderful way to do that and it is free.

Last but not least is here is a list of Resources for Private and Family Collections<http://nedcc.org/resources/family.php> from the Northeast Document Conservation Center.

Hope this helps, I know it is a lot to digest. Please feel free to contact me off-list if you have more questions.

Best,

Christine

Christine Pittsley
Digital Collections Technician
Connecticut State Library
231 Capitol Ave.
Hartford Ct. 06106
860-757-6517
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/CtStateLibrary
Twitter - http://www.twitter.com/LibraryofCt
Flickr - http://www.flickr.com/photos/ctarchives/
Historypin - http://www.historypin.com/channels/view/2662022

On 9 Jul 2012, at 16:55, Melanie C King wrote:

Hey everyone,

My father-in-law wants to take his "family archives" (old letters and photographs, some possibly dating back to the Civil War) and create electronic copies of them, but we aren't sure the best way to do this.

I only have experience with prehistoric Southwestern artifacts, so this really isn't my field, but I do know sometimes certain lights and such can have extremely negative effects and so we wanted to make sure we weren't going to damage anything in this process.

I've already told him about possible issues from handling the papers too much with bare hands, but we weren't sure if a standard at-home scanner would cause issues or if certain regular cameras can cause issues either.

Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated, we're really hoping we can get this project started so we can share their history with generations to come without worrying about the physical documents being in too much of harm's way.

Thank you again,

Melanie Deer

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