Domestic Digitising Doings 06: Sliding to a Halt

It’s not that I’ve been too lazy to update this blog – oh no indeed! Far from it as a matter of fact. A good Curator is adept at prioritising tasks to ensure the best work is done in the best time so in the last, ahem, four months I’ve simply been working on more time-critical endeavours. Like, erm, digging a pond. And catching up with my hobby of sitting down. And drawing naff cartoons. So there.

I will not be giving up the day job. Thanks for asking.

 In amongst this there’s been a major funding bid to submit, a conservation-based chemistry course to get stuck into (more in a future blog…) and, last month, a museum to re-open. I know, I know – excuses excuses…

Anyway…

BACK AT THE SCANNING.

What’s going on with the project to digitise my family’s slide collection?

Well it’s kind of, erm, done.

Yup.

6,451 transparencies all scanned and catalogued, a chronicle of family activities between the early 1960s and 2000. Boom. Done.

Oldest and most recent slides. Each is presented as-scanned with no cleanup, both stored in the same environment. Interesting to note their varying condition - the oldest slide (left, 1960s, unknown film stock) has picked up a good deal of dirt and scratches from a half-century of storage but the colours have remained stable. Contrast with the newest slide (2000s, Fujichrome) which is nice and clean but has picked up a notably green cast. This isn't entirely surprising as Fuji film has a reputation for skewing towards green, but it does illustrate that age isn't necessarily the defining factor regarding the extent to which transparencies/negatives will deteriorate. One should scan everything, obvs!

Actually, truth be told it was done a little while ago – in fact I finished scanning on the 22nd January. Not too shabby considering the work only started on 8th December. Turns out it’s quite easy to average 145 scans per day as long as you have;

a) Created a decent working space and logical workplan to follow.
b) Plugged in a second screen so you can do your day job/watch Christmas films simultaneously.
c) Someone bring you coffee/festive beverages on demand.

Also let's not forget;

d) Nothing else to do.

Although an act of utter insignificance beyond the immediate family (and even then they’re not that bothered), this project has been a fascinating opportunity to consolidate big chunks of our family's recent history and vastly improve access to our own archives. I'm quite proud to have got this far with digitising and feel almost evangelical in my urge to recommend everyone dig our their old images and get scanning!

Like all projects there comes a time for an evaluation. That time is................................. now. 

WHAT WENT WELL?

  • The numbering system worked well, both for numbering individual slides (starting ‘00001’) and for storage boxes (starting ‘0001’). Simplicity is not to be underrated!

  • The MS Excel catalogue, derived from the SPECTRUM basic standard and my own professional experience, was able to quickly record all the available information about the location, form and content of the slides. In the unlikely event that any Museum would take receipt of parts of the collection this database would serve as a handy repository for all the critical data to be migrated into a swish professional Collections Management System (CMS). Curators of the future can thank me with cake. But cake now, not future cake.

  • The balance between the speed of scanning and the quality of the final image was struck reasonably well, with the project whipping along at a fair pace and churning out results suitable for most printing uses without crippling computers in terms of processing time or storage.

  • Taking the time to sort out slide boxes roughly by period and then individual slides into their proper sequences was definitely worth it. As well as speeding up the scanning process, as I didn’t have to look at each slide except to check it was the right way up, this helped the catalogue naturally form sequences which will be much easier to browse.
A view engraved on my brain over winter 2020.

WHAT DIDN'T WENT WELL?

  • Errors were minimised through having a clear workplan and a tidy working area, but annoyingly a couple of errors crept in through my not paying attention. The scanner had a habit, every 100 slides or so, of partially scanning an image and then losing the connection to the PC and saving an incomplete scan. There was an audible cue for this (you get intimately acquainted with the clicks and whirs of the little machine over time), and nine times out of ten I flagged the error and reset the scanner to scan the image again using the same intended filename, instead of automatically moving along to the next number in sequence. On the tenth, however… No images were un-scanned, but there are a couple of blank numbers in the catalogue which irk me.

  • Minor point, in the ‘Person Name’ field in the catalogue I wish I’d created separate fields for each person name instead of lumping them all in the same box. This would have made searching by name easier, but at least it is something which could be rectified on a very very very rainy day.

  • It does niggle a bit that I didn’t individually label the physical slides, as is de-rigueur in museum practice. I umm-ed and aaah-ed about it early on and decided it wasn’t worth the considerable extra time, which I still think was the right thing to do for this project (though I wouldn’t DREAM of not doing it at work!) but, y’know, ach. 

WHAT NOW FOR THE SLIDES?

Back in the box, you.

It's sad in a way. We'd never dream of disposing of these original sources but, now digitised, the majority of the slides are unlikely to pass through a projector again.  For special family occasions, however, we hope to compile show magazines from our shiny new catalogue for a retro joyride down memory lane. 

If you don't have a screen you can easily project an image on the wall
or the flank of a light-coloured cow. 

It would be nice to say that the story ends here, but digitising over 6,000 slides is just the warmup act - I estimate there’s roughly the same quantity again of… negatives. Stay tuned…

Negatives have the twin benefits of being more fiddly and fragile than slides. Woop woop. 

TO BE CONTINUED...

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