 Hello and good day! The National Archives and Records Administration is pleased to present a new genealogy series, a set of educational lectures on how to do family research. My name is Andrea Matney, the program's coordinator, and I welcome you to the first of six sessions. These lectures will demonstrate how to use photo records and other resources for genealogical research for beginning to experience family historians. Our presenters include experts from the National Archives nationwide representing our facilities in College Park, Maryland, Denver, Colorado, New York City, New York, St. Louis, Missouri, and Washington, D.C. So this is the first of six sessions being broadcast over two months, and here is our May schedule, and here is our June schedule. Before we begin, I have several helpful tips on how to participate and locate captioning and handouts. First, we invite you to join us on YouTube's chat and Twitter at us.net archives. So where do you find this chat captioning and handouts? As shown in the upper right corner, chat is available as the video plays. To participate, first log into YouTube and then type into chat. The speakers will answer your questions during the broadcast. You don't have to wait until the end. Please ask your questions in chat at any time. In the bottom left corner of the screen, captioning and handouts are found under the video box. Click the word show more to find their links. After the broadcast, the video presentation and handouts will remain available. Now on to our session. Our session title today is preserving and digitizing personal photo albums and scrapbooks with Sarah Holmes and Noah Durham. Sarah Holmes is a conservator in preservation programs, and Noah Durham is a supervisory preservation specialist. Both work at the National Archives in St. Louis. Our session begins with Sarah Holmes. I am now turning the broadcast over to Sarah. Hi, I'm Sarah Holmes, and I'm coming to you from my home here in Ferguson, Missouri. Then welcome to our presentation on preserving and digitizing photo albums and scrapbooks. Now, who doesn't love flipping through a photo album and seeing all of the things that someone chose to put together in one book? Many of us have wonderful memories of grandparents showing photo albums or scrapbooks with us or putting together our own scrapbooks when we were young. It's a very sentimental thing to do when you bring all together all sorts of different photos, news clippings, memorabilia, and pretty much anything that can be attached somehow to a page. But in gathering all of these memories together, sometimes things go a bit wrong. There can be problems with the structure of the binding of the book itself, especially if it was not meant to accommodate all of the contents. Some materials may simply be unstable. Adhesives may degrade over the years. Plastics used in the binding or included in attachments may deteriorate. The mix of different mediates may spur on chemical processes of deterioration. And of course, the often on sizes can be a difficulty for storage in your home. It's also a difficulty in storage in many archives as well. Now, the first thing that you want to look at with a book that you want to preserve is what kind of open ability does it have? Because of course you want to have access to the book. Ideally the binding accommodates for the thickness of what is added on or perhaps slides inside in the case of these albums. You can see that these structures have a special hinge. It lets the pages lay perfectly flat when they're open regardless of where in the book you are at the beginning or end. Now, take a look at how your book opens. Does it roll open or are there breaks or stresses along the spine or the binding? These images here show albums that were very well designed to accommodate thickness and still allow for the pages to turn easily. Now, of course not all bindings are going to lay perfectly flat. Many will roll open similar to the way a book would open. As you can see here on the top photo, this is nice and neatly opening. The bottom photo is a little ratty. Though here the binding has had problems, you can see the very bottom that the front cover is actually broken off. The binding when it rolls from front to back, you can see that there are attached pages inside that sometimes get caught and torn even. Little creases, little tears. Sometimes you get bindings that just don't even want to stay open. And this can be true of historic as well as more recent bindings. Here on the left you have an early 1900s album that was made by Kodak and it's this really stiff stab binding that can only be held open by weight. And even modern album makers sometimes paid very little attention to ensuring that the album can lay open for viewing. Now, of course these can be very difficult to use with enjoyment because they're simply hard to open. And sometimes you simply have bindings that don't work well. It might be the binding itself or because of the contents that have been added to it. And at the bottom you see a spiral binding that keeps catching every time you try to turn the page. And at the top you've got this overstuffed binding and it's just not suitable for use as an album to at least this extent for adding in the contents. Now let's consider the attachment methods of adding a photo or an item to the page. Now one of the most traditional historically is the photo corner. And this is used in the early albums and they often would allow for the photographs to be moved in and out with ease as long as when the adhesive was placed down it didn't catch and adhere the photograph as well. So do take care any time you want to see if you can remove a photograph from an album of photo corners. It might be adhered with the paste and the glue of the photo corner. Now glues and pastes themselves are of course very popular for adding in items for photographs or news clippings. Now here on the left you can see that there are problems with distortion because the wet paste was used to attach an item to a page. And this causes creases in waves. You can see it in this much more recent album as well where you have dips and curves and waves on the page itself. And of course tape. Tape has been tremendously used over time and the self-adhesive tape has often caused a lot of problems. Now the formula for the adhesive has varied over the years so you will see differences where some of it might look like it was just freshly put on yesterday and it doesn't appear to have caused any deterioration. And others can be extremely stained in this color. You may have some that just have simply desiccated and you might also have some where the adhesive has creeped out so that you've got gooey gluey adhesive coming out and attaching itself to anything that comes in contact with it. Now a lot of these can require a conservator to do special treatments if there is a big problem. But do very well remember that you don't want to simply pull off the plastic carrier unless you're able and ready to deal with the adhesive. Because once you pull that carrier off you're exposing the adhesive that's still on your photo or clipping or paper to oxygen and that's going to spiral in all sorts of different chemical reactions and could create more problems than you had before. Now torn pages these can certainly be commonly found. Some of these are basically a result of bad binding systems. Some of these also happen because of the kind of page attachment to it. It's also very easy for the flexible paper to get torn when you've got something stiff and heavier attached to it. Just think of any time you're repetitively moving the page and opening and closing that creates a repetitive motion that causes stress. And of course you can simply have somebody who accidentally does something a little harsh in this handling and you've got to tear. Now pages can be mended by a conservator or a trained technician so they don't have to be removed from the book to be treated. Now another issue here is desiccation and desiccation can occur to adhesives that are part of the binding as well as part of the attachment. Now here on the left you can see you can spy at the side of that album page. There's an edge that's standing just upright. That is a failure of the adhesive on the hinge of the page so that the page is actually coming entirely loose. So in the essence this is an album that's starting to basically disbind itself to separate the page attachment. And then of course you may have glue that was intended to hold photos or other items and everything's simply falling off. Now if you want to keep your album intact you can use a hinge attachment to reattach the items or look for photo corners. They still make them so you may be able to use that. Now if you're using a hinge attachment or reattaching with some kind of adhesive do definitely work with the conservator so that they can look at all the materials and items that you've got and make the best judgment of what is a permanent solution that won't cause damage. Now creep and goo is a big issue of course with adhesive. It causes pages to stick together and of course this can be a problem with the album structure or with the attachments. You can see there at the bottom that again it's the structure of the page and this is what we call creep where the adhesive has actually come out from underneath of where it was originally placed and it's creeped out over time and it's sealing the edges of the pages together. Magnetic photo albums like you see here on the right or it's heavily discolored in that diagonal pattern these have a very stubborn hard adhesive that holds very well and you can if you've got something that's gooey and coming out you can use interleaving paper or tissue to prevent it from attaching itself to other pages especially since that's an easy way to introduce more tearing. The problem there can often be that you've also have albums that are getting overstuffed already and interleaving adds more thickness to it so you may have to just find it to have interleaving in between the pages. And of course plastic. Plastic has been very popular especially from the mid-century to the present day. You may find it in some earlier albums as well. Unfortunately it was widely used before we had a good understanding of what was photo safe and what wears well. So we've got you know mid-century and we have a very popular vinyl albums. You can see in this wedding album that the vinyl pages have some kind of a polyester cover to it and chemically it actually looks pretty stable. The photos which are black and light which can be a positive for preservation have held up stable very well but you can see there's a tear that was easily introduced and of course that can can cause contaminants to to enter into the page and problems there. You know the top photo here on the right side shows where two vinyl coated albums were sitting next to each other. This happened because sometimes when plastics are starting to deteriorate they become soft and even gooey. So it just flat out stuck together and then when somebody was trying to get it apart it just ripped apart. So you may come across instances where the plastic has become a gooey mess and you can't get it apart unless you physically separate it or of course get a conservator to help you. Now at the bottom here is one of those magnetic photo album pages and you can see a rippling distortion in the plastic covering. So you know these are all examples of deterioration that plastics can can have that you might see in your own family collections. Now to to know exactly what kind of plastic you've got can take some some special training and identification but it's obviously very easy to be able to identify problem materials that you may have in your albums. And of course with scrapbooks you're mixing a lot of media together and that can create problems and it could be damage that's created from chemical degradation or simply mechanical wear. Now on the left here you see an example of a scrapbook that has embellishments that became very popular a few decades ago and you can see the marks that it's left on you puncture marks basically that's left on the pages from the the decorative little daisies that they had on it. On the top right you see a photograph that is tremendously discolored and damaged. This was actually not pasted in on a page of the album but on the inside front of the vinyl cover itself. So you have some possible issues of what has been mixed together you've got the vinyl plastic in contact you've got whatever adhesive was used and it's just heavily heavily discolored and deteriorated the photo. And of course at the bottom you have a typical example of what adhesive damage can start to create. Now I do also really want to talk about being able to access the individual photos whether you're looking for identification that's on the back or wanting to get a better image of them then you can get in the album alone for digitization. Now of course some of them might be able to slide in and out this is an album that was meant to slide in and out but you can also see all of the tears from people over generations who did slide them in and out in tour so be very careful. And of course photos that are adhered the pasted or glued down or used those magnetic albums these are ones that can be very easily damaged once you try and get it out. Here we've got a glued in photo that somebody ripped out and you can see bits of paper that were left behind and the page itself was totally torn. On the right side we have a photo that came out of a magnetic album and not all of it even came out it came in tears and you can see a great big chunk that is just missing it actually missed tearing the emotion of it but you can see in the bottom how translucent it is because you've torn off virtually all of the backing in areas. Now when items are really glued in and you make the call to move them out it is ideal to consult a conservator. Now for magnetic albums do note that in your handout for this presentation there is a link to a wonderful video by our colleagues at the Library of Congress that shows you how to remove your photos from magnetic albums but there is so much variation in materials and how they might degrade over time that do be aware of that if it doesn't work easily you really just want to stop and not cause damage that will be irreversible. Of course the probably the biggest argument to remove glued in photos is the possibility of information and I have to work on family albums where it was definitely desired to see what was on the back and yes there was actually quite a goldmine to it. Here we have on the left side some family postcards where you actually have the correspondence online you know that message to my dear mother and the photograph is actually from family that had immigrated to Australia so great information that you wouldn't find unless you did take it back. On the other hand you may go through a lot of trouble and get something here on the right you see was written you know who this is not exactly helpful. Now this was a treatment in which it was determined that we would not keep the album pages and not try and attempt to keep the album intact so the album itself was imaged so that we had a photographs of what was the order and the position of the original arrangement was that's very important if you're going to take something apart and we also made a decision not to go any farther in treatment beyond this for one thing you would take a lot of time for the conservator to do the work so financially it's not necessarily feasible and you can also see that even with these adhesive splotches left with the album pages you can make out an awful lot of the text and as far as this goes it's really fairly stable this can probably last for centuries even with that glue still adhered to it. Now I want to give you some tips on what kind of materials you can use to help preserve your photos albums and your scrapbooks. Now the most important thing to realize is that archival is not some kind of standardized product it's not a certified term and it can be used by anyone for anything for any purpose so that alone is not something to go by. You do want to look for things that say pH neutral or acid-free but be very savvy so that you understand that what pH neutral or acid-free is now is not static and it doesn't stay that way over time. Now unless it's in a very bad environment or it's in contact with something that's extremely acidic it will take a long time like decades probably most likely to become more acidic and this is especially true if you've got something that is buffered and that's something with an alkaline reserve just typically calcium or magnesium. You do also want to look for descriptions that say that it's lignin-free when you're using paper-based products. Lignin in the tree becomes acidic as it degrades over time and it was commonly used in wood pulp for paper before they understood this deterioration process and that's the big reason that like all those newspaper clippings that turn so yellow have been so discolored. Now if you're interleaving so that you're using paper or tissue that will come in contact with other materials you need to understand the difference of when to use buffered tissue that has an alkaline reserve and when to use unbuffered because there are materials that need to be slightly acidic or else they will be damaged. So you do want to use buffered material for black and white photos, black and white negatives for most papers and for cotton-based textiles. Now you want to use your unbuffered tissue for color photographs and color negatives, blueprints, silk, wool, leather, things that are protonaceous and metals. Now for instance if you use acetylene materials or try to deacidify a blueprint you would actually wipe out the entire image. So you need to understand that some of these things need some acidity to them. There are pens that you can use and can purchase at our harvest suppliers that will test the acidity to see if it's at a proper pH but again keep in mind that doesn't necessarily tell you that you have to change something about the material that you're testing. You can look for one thing that has a standardized test and that is the photoactivity test the PAT test and it will have that little logo there past PAT. Now there are photosafe products that haven't been tested yet so not everything that can potentially be used will have the past the PAT logo with it. Now I want to give you a few basic tool tips as well so that you can try and do a few things on your own. The one thing that you can do when you're trying to remove photographs that slide in and out of an album like that very early photo album that I showed you earlier is to use a small piece of polyester. If you can slide that in then that gives you something smooth that you can slide the photograph out against rather than having the rip and tear as you saw in that album. The kind of polyester we use with archival materials is trademarked as Melonix or Mylar. You'll see both and you may hear or see somebody citing one of these trademark names. You don't want to use simple clear plastic polyester that you get just simply at the archival okay three two one you don't want to use just any kind of plastic that you get at the office supply store because some of those will have slips and additives added to them that can damage materials that they come into contact with over time so do be sure that you're getting something that is considered to be archival use. Now for photos and items that are pasted down you can use a microspatula for probing it can also be very helpful for turning pages you know if you've got something with that adhesive goo that will help probe and turn the page and get in where you can't just simply get your hand in. Microspatulas are also very heavily used in archives to remove fasteners staples and paper clips so it's something that's really good to have on your toolkit. Now a bone or Teflon folder is extremely useful as well in your toolkit. You can use this to to gently relax folds and creases in the paper that and you want to use this paper that has flexibility if the creases and heavy weight or stiff paper or even a thin board you will more easily cause damage if you try and use anything to to relax the fold. When something is folded you never want to fold back in the opposite direction of where the fold is or you will break the paper fibers and create a fragment. Think of a book where someone dog aired the page instead of using a bookmark and how it was damaged or even came off. You don't want to do that with the family papers the fibers are damaged with the first crease or fold made and then once you make a fold in the opposite direction you just create even more damage. I'm going to do just a short little demonstration here so that you can see what I mean about using a bone folder. You can find bone folders that are going to look different ways. This right here is a bone folder that is made from bone and this is a Teflon folder so you can find something as an alternative if you prefer not to have something that's bone and they can be in different shapes and sizes. You probably just need something that's about five inches long and an inch or so wide. Now when you have something that has been folded like this you want to be able to just gently relax the crease. You turn it to where the V goes up and just very gently and I hold my bone folder this way. You may choose to hold it somewhat differently just like you people hold pens and pencils differently and just very gently you will go across. You do not want to go strong and heavy or else you'll just leave marks. You just want to very gently go across. Now for storing your albums boxes just can't be beat as a way to stabilize the contents and protect them. You can of course make your own custom size boxes or you can use a ready-made that's larger and perhaps just add in an insert to keep it from sliding around so it can't accidentally shift. But I do recommend checking into using custom size machine boxes and there are a number of places that you can order these and they're listed in your handout so you can check them out. In addition to fitting really well you get the benefits that the machine made boxes are you use a thinner board so that the construction minimizes shelf space. Now the importance of using a box is that it can help provide a microclimate. You want of course to keep everything that is important to your family history in a good environment. Hopefully you know this very well you know that you don't want to be keeping this in your basement or keeping it in an attic where you will get temperature extremes or moisture and boxes go an extra length because they help provide a microclimate. They will have the safety of protecting it from you know if you have a small leak it will absorb a lot of water before it gets to the album. You can also look at making individual boxes by a conservator or a book binder if you want something that is fancy or particularly attractive. You know scrapbooks and photo albums have so many possibilities. If you were hoping that I would cover something in particular that wasn't addressed here or that doesn't get addressed during our live chat session then please do reach out to us at the email address here and we'll help you. You know right now I'm going to turn you over to Noah so that he can cover how to work with albums and digitize them. Thanks Sarah my part in this session is to discuss digitization of scrapbooks and photo albums. So as you could see from Sarah's presentation this is not necessarily a simple task. It's complicated because they could be oversized they won't lay flat they contain items that are folded so with all those difficulties it still can be done and I'm going to provide some tips for how to do it best. So my talk today is covering the three aspects of this. First I'm going to talk about the equipment you can use for this. I'm going to show examples of photographic methods to overcome those challenges I just spoke of and I'm also going to talk about how we at the National Archives organize and track images in digitization projects and how that might apply to work photographing scrapbooks and photo albums. Okay I want to talk about the equipment options available. I've identified four equipment options here and at the National Archives we use three of the four of these in photographing our holdings. The first one being a combination of a camera a copy stand and supplemental lighting and this is pretty common it's a very flexible approach. The second is some type of dedicated book scanner and I'll show you examples of that. The third is a flatbed scanner and we use those oftentimes for photographs at the National Archives and the fourth we approach uses some type of consumer device like an iPad or an iPhone an Android phone and our researchers in our research room will come in and use that type of approach to photograph documents while on site. So I wanted to point out also that you could spend a wide range of money on on any one piece of equipment. So here on the slide I'm illustrating the fact that a camera could range from $350 all the way up to $65,000. If the $65,000 camera shot is out of focus then obviously the $350 camera may make a better picture. So what you spend probably isn't as important as your technique or your methods are. So taking a look at this approach of copy stand with camera I wanted to point out that this is very flexible approach. As the camera goes higher on the copy stand column you can incorporate a greater imaging area. So therefore you can choose a range of originals from a small original to a large original all on this same equipment. It's important that you think about with this type of setup how are you actually viewing what's being photographed. So a camera can possibly tether with a computer and on the computer screen you'll see your image area what you're photographing. It's also possible that your camera has a feature something that's called live focus which is sort of a video that allows you to focus your camera on the computer screen. It may be the case that you don't have those features and that you're actually going to need to sort of stand over the camera and look down through the back of the camera to focus. But ideally you'll find a camera that has one of those features that can tether or live focus. So I've just talked a little bit about some of the things you think about with this setup and you see it requires some photographic know-how to set it up and operate this type of system. So I've listed that here as a con. It's also important that you have enough photographic know-how to not consistently repeat small mistakes that will create a lot of rework in this type of imaging approach. Moving ahead to the next imaging approach we have the book scanner and the beauty of the book scanner is that a lot of the choices have been made for you. The copy area is fixed the lens focus is fixed the resolution is fixed because of that you don't need the level of photographic know-how to operate this equipment. So patrons can operate this equipment, non technicians can operate this equipment and get quite good results. So that's a big advantage of the book scanner but one of its advantages in being having all these fixed attributes is that is also its disadvantage. So you may encounter some scrapbooks or photo albums that are that are too large for this setup or you get glare from plastic and you can't change the lighting angle because the lighting angle is built in. So I also wanted to mention that on the lower right there is the Fuji scan snap device at $600 and the National Archives uses a lot of these for imaging documents today. They're simple, they work well, they have good quality and they require no photographic know-how to be very productive and efficient in image capture. So moving ahead to the next basic approach would be a flatbed scanner. Okay so excellent quality for loose photographs and documents provided they're in good condition however if you have bound volumes they probably won't lay flat on the platen and glare and shadows will be apparent in the image so not the first choice for scrapbooks or photo albums. And the last category I'll talk about is iPad or consumer phone device something like that. On Amazon there are a lot of different photographic stands that will allow you to use your phone as a copy device and as I mentioned before researchers will bring will use these in our research rooms. If you're looking for this kind of device an important attribute would be the ability to take the picture with a with some sort of external trigger so you're not actually touching the the screen and shaking the screen while you're while you're taking the picture. So I've listed some pros and cons for all these various approaches. All right so let's talk about photographing scrapbooks and photo albums and the first and obvious challenges oftentimes are oversized so what are some ways to overcome this well if you're using a copy stand you can switch lenses on the camera or you could even take the column of the copy stand off and mount it on a table edge therefore giving me more space to shoot a larger original. If you're not using a copy stand in a camera you can also divide up into smaller sections and take smaller pictures. Another common problem would be when open pages do not lay flat and require some form of flattening or restraint. So a solution for this and I'm going to provide examples are weights and strapping. It's also possible that software will have a correction for the curvature and the spines. This is commonly available in a book scanner software it's also you can in photoshop you can correct for this distortion in the spine. So here on the upper left is an example of polyethylene strapping and it's used in combination with beanbag weights. Polyethylene is soft plastic and it's transparent so you can use that combination of weights and strapping to hold a page flat. This is superior to just to just dropping a sheet of glass down on top of a full page. It won't cover as much of the image and it's a gentler form of of holding it flat. And right below that another tool you could use is a snake weight. A snake weight in this in this image is being used in combination with a book cradle a custom book cradle to hold a page flat keep keep it keep it in a position to photograph successfully. If you're doing photographs of photo albums you may find that this method on the upper right is successful and that's just to stack to build mat for to build up height. So as you photograph you can you can and the spine starting starts to even up you can remove a board from one side and add it to the opposite side keeping keeping the full page spread flat and even. You'll notice that integrated book cradle to do this for you so the lower right hand picture is an example of how that gap in the spine can be adjusted with a book with an integrated book cradle and the height on either side can be independently adjusted as as you go through and photograph the bound original. Another issue that's common with these types of originals is shadows inside the valley between the two pages. So a solution for this is to vary the directional lighting strength and I'll give an example of that in the next slide. So in this example you see how the article on this page is nearly illegible because of the shadow and the lighting is even in this example left to right but because of the position of the lights and the position of the of the pages you can't get any light in there. So the problem area can be fixed by changing the strength of the lighting to the right so when we increase the lighting on the right hand side we're able to then better read this article and make a better picture of it. So that's the solution for that and with scrapbooks and photo albums you're going to encounter all sorts of folds, papers, 3d objects, overlaps and it's in order to successfully photograph everything it's probably going to take more than one shot to reveal all the content even on one photo album page in many cases. So I wanted to show an example of shooting the same page several times to reveal content. So for example this would be the first shot and as you can see there are a couple items that fold out. So the next shot the next shot in sequence has one one item folded out and the next shot and then the next item folded out and you notice here in in these shots the we're using a simple flat piece of polyester to as a restraint to hold the folded items flat. Okay a common problem that's going to happen with all the plastic in photo albums and scrapbooks is glare. So the best solution for this is to just attempt to keep lighting sources at 45 degree angles to reduce the glare angle or change the glare angle so it's not bouncing directly back at the camera and if that's not working if you can't keep that 45 degree angle consistent then you can also use a more diffuse lighting source. So a direct lighting source would be something like sunlight or or a a bright bolt. A diffuse lighting source would be just environmental room light or a light with a diffuser on it something like a you know a cover over a photographic light. So if you're countering glare then the best approach is to experiment with the angle or to go with a more diffuse lighting source. At NARA we also use slugs these are explanatory statements about the image and these will be useful if you have content in a photo album or scrapbook that you can't photograph for one reason or another. It could be that if it's impossible to lay the item flat it could be a roll rollback item that is taped down so a slug can provide an explanation for why something is an image. For example NARA uses several slugs in in its document imaging. Slugs such as foldouts missing pages pages can't be separated. I've listed several here that we use. All this is to provide context for a viewer of the image. So we produce these as little strips of paper that we insert into the actual shot itself. All right I want to show you how we deal with scrapbooks that are in our case record material that's loosely placed inside folders. Commonly we'll shoot this in sort of a spread view type shot and I wanted to give you an example of that. It could be helpful if the contents of your scrapbook or photo album are already disassembled and just placed loosely inside this scrapbook. So here's an example. The first shot starts as a viewer would open up this scrapbook. This is what they would see. They would see one document on the right hand side and as we move forward and look at the next image this image will flip over. I do want to point out yes there we go. So the next shot is the back of the first page and the front of the second page and the next shot will be will carry on in that same manner. I'm using a flip sheet here so underneath this onion skin paper which is semi-transparent. I'm flipping a white sheet underneath there to prevent show-through from the page underneath it which is a good tip. And here in this image we have some tape so we would likely insert a slug here saying that that rollback item could not be fully photographed and that would explain to the user who's looking at this image why they don't see the item in the next shot that it couldn't be photographed. So it's important if you're using this overhead spread view that you can capture the full size of the open scrapbook or photo album it's also important that you have sufficient resolution so if you look you will want to check your smallest text and make sure you're resolving your smallest text accurately. You need higher resolution in order to photograph such a large area and still captures small text. So I'm going to talk a little bit about naming, organizing and tracking images. Obviously what you do in this realm is going to determine your ability to find these these files later on. So you should apply a consistent and descriptive folder hierarchy that is naming folders naming files according to what they are and how they're described in your case. So in NARA's case when when we store on our cloud storage for example we have a record group we have a series identifier and then we go down to the file unit or other type of separator and that's how images that I transfer up to the catalog are stored in storage then some of that's repeated then in the in the image name itself so the image name itself contains the series identifier the file unit which in some cases could be a folder or a box and then some form of image sequence. So an image sequence being in this case .001 this this image sequence would be good up to a thousand images. So if I had a box of with fewer than our folder with greater than a hundred but up to a thousand then that .001 sequence is what how I'd want to ultimately rename these files. Some tracking tips I have for computing is you can always create a text file like a readme file and place that inside each folder of images. The text files can can list the particulars of a camera setup the lighting something like that so that in the future you you have those notes about what you know but it helps explain how these images were created. Importantly we we tend to track things using spreadsheets and the spreadsheet can contain a hyperlink to the folder on on your computer. So a spreadsheet may have a cell with a link that takes you with a simple double click will take you right to the folder and then that line of that so that row of that spreadsheet can track other information about what you're photographing. So those are very useful and lastly lists lists are really important and and a colleague from the catalog unit here at NARA gave me a great tip and I use it all the time in our unit and we uploaded a half a million images last year to the catalog so we're dealing with lots and lots of images and this tip is to use the directory command or the dir command to build a list of images and this is useful in terms of checking your naming and just building lists of images. So the directory command that said I sound so useful helps helps quality control so it generates a list and that list can be output to a text file and and you can scroll through and and very quickly you can see if sequences are off and naming conventions are broken so and that that's important because in many cases and you can imagine with a scrapbook or a photo album you may have say a hundred pictures you want to maintain that order from the first page of the scrapbook to the end of the scrapbook so if there's a naming error by the time you know your 35th image may end up out of place so your first image may end up at the end so so you want to maintain the sequence and the best way to check that is to look through a list like this so in this example I have here on this slide we have a file in the 36th position that was misnamed and it ought to be in the first position it's a 001.jpg.jpg and that was the error I was able to discover that because I did the list and so checking naming convention is the important part of quality control. Several format choices exist for file formats and at NARA we use all three of these that I've listed here and typically we we will capture an image as a tiff file and that that may be saved for long-term archiving. This particular image may may not be the one that that we distribute to customer or put on a catalog but it's kept for the long term it will be the highest quality version because it doesn't have image compression applied to it and the file size is typically larger because of that. This image may actually not be cropped and it could contain color bars or other test test bars to ensure that it was focused correctly and captured with the right settings. The next file format is jpg and that's the smaller compressed file size and this is optimal for access for storage for distribution and a jpg file is also used in our case oftentimes as a raw material for producing multi-page versions in pdf so if I were producing a reader file or an access version of a scrapbook or a photo album I would do a multi-page pdf and I would make that from my jpg file so the last format I'm listing here is pdf and that would be the image the image set that goes out to describe that photo album it would be one file with 100 images versus 100 loose files so it's easier to communicate and distribute a file like that than a to do it with 100 images so you may think and I'm putting it as a tip you may think that multi-page tip is a good format however if you do save in that format it's unlikely that all desktop computers will be able to open or see multi-page tips so I'm suggesting that you avoid that that format here's an example of a digitization workflow after taking the pictures so there's work to be done after your you've taken the images adnara will always do a QC for completeness so what we're doing there is we're checking the original against the scans and we're doing that as a as a as on the computer monitor uh page by page check to make sure nothing was missed at this point you'll probably do some sort of optimization of color or contrast or cropping and if there are any problems they'll be rework reshooting rescanning and then final image naming and sequencing so when you first take a picture with your device it's probably going to be called something like image 01 image 02 and you're going to apply a different file name and the best way to do that is with the utility that produces file names in batch so a batch renaming utility now you can get that in adobe photoshop adobe bridge or you can look online and find other renaming utility but it's an important part anytime you're making this many images you're going to ultimately need to rename files a lot so some type of utility will will be useful and then you're going to create your access version so that might be a multi page pdf for example and then the final step would be distribution whether that be to a catalog a website a kiosk and then some form of archiving so that's how we do digitization workflow after after the image work on camera set is completed so here's some info on storing images this has changed a lot now because of the advent of cloud storage but the best practices remain always have more than one copy that should make sense really you're a lot of risk in this is accidental deletion so it may not be that there's a technological failure it can be that there's a human failure and somebody copies over something that they shouldn't or delete something that they shouldn't so have more than one copy you can also build in some failsafe in your process by keeping your images on your image device or your camera storage card until they've been fully processed so what i'd recommend is you know if you're photographing using a camera and a copy stand that you keep keep a copy of your images on the card that was inside your camera in addition to the computer that you're using to process the images and then when your your processing work is complete and you're ready to archive images you have several choices you can have a separate hard drive system that's fine you can use cloud storage this happens nearly automatically on on some computers you'll have you know buy a new computer you'll probably get a subscription to a cloud storage along with that you can also maintain an optical disc library like dvd or blu-ray sounds old batch and but those are optical not magnetic forms of storage so the the long-term preservation they they they last and what i what i'll say about that so i know it's kind of a technical discussion we had today if you have any questions feel free to contact me about any of that that's my talk thank you thank you so much no i appreciate that that was technical but it's an amazing amount of expertise that everyone both of you show so again sarah thank you so much and noa um please stick around if you have questions so although we are wrapping up the video portion of the broadcast we will continue to take your questions in the chat for another 10 minutes please stay if you are watching during the premiere broadcast and have questions if you have questions after the broadcast please submit them to preservation at narah.gov also know that the video presentation recording and handouts will remain available on this youtube web page we do value your opinion so please take a minute to complete a short evaluation find the link under show more before end day we want to share gratitude for the behind-the-scenes staff amber forester is our youtube chat moderator jamie adkinson brian sipperly julie reid jason winston and alexis van dyke make up our audio visual staff and haim captioning is the captioning 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