Mark Rosenstein

>   Would be interesting to know what formats are you using in your
>   scanning or photographing works.
>   The fact is that each format has his owns caracteristics, volume,
>   etc. We are always interesting in the best quality but, for
>   example, with my hardware a single scanned image with top quality
>   has occupyed about 90 M memory on the disk (GIF), wich is amazing
>   and completly out of question. ...

>I think the first question is what is the purpose of the scan. Is it
>for preservation, or access or a notation in a catalog? If it is for
>preservation (i.e. the original will be destroyed after the scanning)
>than I highly recommend, if at all possible, waiting till the issues
>in preservation in digital media are better understood.......

We are using scanned and digital photograph images for catalog purposes and
also for reproduction of old
photographs. In this last case, we often receive (temporarely lent) family
photographs wich we have to
return to the owners a few days later after beeing copyed. Dificultly we will
have the chance of having it again,
so that's why it is important to have the best possible copy. For using in
ecran or web of course we can convert
in GIF or JPG, but we allways must have a "master" image for publishing for
example.

The fact is that I got "shocked" with the size of the file (about 90 M) in TIFF
wich is apparently the best
option for the "master" image. Even with CD-R possibilities that's too much...

Anyway your comments have been extremely interesting. Thank you.

Emanuel