Library Technology Conference: Digital Preservation Day at the Library

Sara Ring and Lizzie Baus, Minitex

Minitex has a new program, Scan for Keeps- free loan to any organization in MN of digitization kits if you promise to have a program. 

Kits contain:

• Scanner
• Laptop-to capture metadata
• Lightbox and camera - to capture 3D objects
• Flash drives
• Rulers
• Pencils
• Photoshop software for image editing
• Paper forms -check-in, metadata, consent/release

 Pelican case for mobile digitization station.

Lightbox.

Epson Perfection V850 scanner and laptop.

Preservation Week is 4/22 - 4/28 -plan well in advance before you decide to host a program. 

Ask yourself-what’s your goal?

• Community engagement- Genealogy groups are a core audience. 
• Collaborating with historical societies to get to know them 
• Public education-teaching about preservation.
• Programming related to preservation- could combine with talk on local history
• Materials collection.

Tips for hosting a Digital Preservation Day at your library:

• Promote in local newspaper
• You will have to help patrons understand the importance of metadata-the won’t always be around to explain that it was Grandma at the old summer home in 1952.-who,what, where,when - a date range is OK. Ask patrons about stories related to the photo to trigger memories.
• Have a metadata spreadsheet.
• Teach them about storage - light, heat, moisture can damage
• Check in station-form with short description of materials & contact info.
• Wear gloves for delicate items. 
• Staff should do the actual scanning. There is a cheat sheet for scanning in kit.
• If they want to do further editing, e.g. improve the picture, leave it up to patrons.
• Give out a brochure on digital preservation and what to do with the items after they go home.
• Tell patrons to think about a naming scheme than makes sense for digital copies- Avoid spaces or special characters other than hyphens or underscores.
• Minitex recommends saving images as TIFF files, because they retain a lot of information. Save images for patrons as JPEG as well, so they can share on social media.
• Advise patrons to back up their treasures with multiple copies -3-2-1 rule -computer, CD/external hard drive, cloud storage.
• Limit the amount of items each patron can scan.

A few words on pixels and image formats:

Pixels are building blocks of digital images -like an atom. How many blocks of pixels determines density of image-the bigger you can blow it up before it distorts. Bit depth = how many colors you are able to assign to each pixel. Minitex recommends saving images is 24-bit RGB TIFF - a large file, but retains a lot of information. RAW is a very huge unprocessed file that retains all information. JPEG is very lossy- you lose a lot of information.  

Minitex has best practices that include pixel density, size, and file formats for images and audio. 

Equipment list, staffing, forms and suggestions for collaborations are available here.

Reserve a kit via email: mino@umn.edu.

Presentation is here.


--Andrea @GLCL