Cornell’s “Moving Theory into Practice” Tutorial

This tutorial (http://www.library.cornell.edu/preservation/tutorial/) was a great introduction to digital imaging basics, though a bit overwhelming for a beginner like me. I couldn’t process it all, but will definitely go back to it once I actually start working on projects and need the details to help me figure out what I’m doing. The additional readings looked helpful as well.

The formulas for benchmarking the quality of the digitized images, which this tutorial really stresses, were particularly difficult for me to wrap my mind around right now. I understood the underlying concepts, but found myself skimming over the details of the actual measurements. What often seems to be important is establishing reference points, so that the image outputs can be standardized, and you don’t find yourself (or the technician) making subjective judgements throughout the process. It seems that the more images that one digitizes, the harder it would be to keep the changes accurate without having these reference points to go back to. As we discussed in class, color can be particularly difficult to tweak, and can be quite subjective.

For me, the most interesting and complicated issues are those dealing with metadata and file management. These areas of digitization processes (including the networks, IT infrastructures, etc.) seem much more obscure to me than other aspects of the process (i.e. selections, scanning, and reformatting decisions) and I want to learn more about how and where the information is stored and accessed once it has been digitized. Obviously, digital preservation is also very related to these file management issues, and is something that people in our field are particularly concerned with. There don’t seem to be many answers about how to preserve all of these digital objects.

One of our readings referred to a digital project created by the BBC in the 1980s, the Domesday Project, which was related to the original Domesday Book compiled in 1086. The information collected in the 1980s (videos and more about British citizens) was almost inaccessible within just a decade and a half, as the equipment that was used to access it became obsolete. The original Domesday Book from 1086 is still readable. Here’s an article from the BBC about the project and attempts to save the info: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2534391.stm .

They finally figured it out using an emulator, but it seems like it was a huge project. Scary.