Medieval Manuscripts Revealed on the Web
The Life of a Digitizer
It's a rainy day today in Baltimore--tucked away in our little corner of the Walters Art Museum we can only see the outside from the skylights outside our lab door, and when it rains (or snows) it gives the place the feeling of being cocooned in. This, unfortunately, results in sleepy afternoons! (Don't worry, boss, our productivity is still holding steady.)
The Henry Walters' Library Online project is situated in the Asian art wing of the museum, in a little room that used to be a gallery of Thai sculpture. Now, it's been converted into a state-of-the-art digitization lab. The imaging apparatus (fondly nicknamed Omar) occupies most of the central floor space, while a black-out curtain blocks off one corner, which has its own daylight-balanced lighting. This way, color correcting and imaging can be performed at the same time without the lighting interfering with either process. (By the way, each image is deskewed, cropped, and corrected for color, but not touched up, i.e. no defects in the original object are cleaned away to make the image look prettier. It might seem obvious that we wouldn't do that, but it's actually a question we get a lot.)
With two people in the lab, we tend to switch back and forth, one person imaging and the other correcting, entering metadata for new manuscripts, FTPing images to our cataloger, or doing something administrative. Often, we're both called upon to troubleshoot problems together. We're definitely a team, two horses pulling in the same harnass. As a word of advice to anyone considering their own digital operation: Pay attention during the hiring process and make sure your digitizers will get along!
The Henry Walters' Library Online project is situated in the Asian art wing of the museum, in a little room that used to be a gallery of Thai sculpture. Now, it's been converted into a state-of-the-art digitization lab. The imaging apparatus (fondly nicknamed Omar) occupies most of the central floor space, while a black-out curtain blocks off one corner, which has its own daylight-balanced lighting. This way, color correcting and imaging can be performed at the same time without the lighting interfering with either process. (By the way, each image is deskewed, cropped, and corrected for color, but not touched up, i.e. no defects in the original object are cleaned away to make the image look prettier. It might seem obvious that we wouldn't do that, but it's actually a question we get a lot.)
With two people in the lab, we tend to switch back and forth, one person imaging and the other correcting, entering metadata for new manuscripts, FTPing images to our cataloger, or doing something administrative. Often, we're both called upon to troubleshoot problems together. We're definitely a team, two horses pulling in the same harnass. As a word of advice to anyone considering their own digital operation: Pay attention during the hiring process and make sure your digitizers will get along!
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2 Comments
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Comment by Henry Walters' Library Online on March 30, 2009 at 2:46pm -
Of course not! We have Bollywood! And audiobooks.
But seriously, there is always some new wrinkle to work out, whether with equipment or metadata or workflow. And each new manuscript is like a puzzle to solve. What does the book need to make it happy in the cradle? Do we need to change the lighting? How will we best get our resolution? (Not to mention that the manuscripts are so fascinating. The best part of the job is getting to handle these very old and precious objects.)
Our boss is always concerned about our being bored, but we can honestly (and easily) say that there hasn't been a sigle boring day yet. Doubt there will be either.
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Comment by Will Noel on March 27, 2009 at 3:59pm - It sounds cool. But isn't it a bit boring just taking image after image?
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