B34N
Newbie
I am trying to help a museum bring order to a few thousand slides in their collection. The ultimate goal would be to have the archive shared and searchable on their website. The slides date from the late 1940s to the early 1980s and as far as I can tell, all of them are in color. The first problem is that the slides are currently in no discernible order. While most are safely in slide boxes (not projector trays), a good number are just loosely jumbled in boxes. How do you suggest someone get started with this type of project?
My first inclination was to assign each slide an index number, quickly scan them in (low resolution and little to no post processing), store them in slide boxes by index number and then put the images on the web to use crowdsourcing to identify the content in the slides. This archive is of vintage race cars at various events so it is the type of thing that enthusiasts would enjoy helping to identify and assign meta data such as the make/model of car, event, driver and other identifying characteristics. The main roadblock that I came to was trying to find an effective way to get these slides into digital form. The quality and resolution is not an issue as all we need is something of good enough quality to identify the content. Later on we would go back and select a subset of slides to be professionally scanned and processed. I suspect that while we are starting with a few thousand slides, we would initially only want a hundred or so to be digitally reproduced at a professional level. Any thoughts or suggestions on this approach? I was going to try to develop the website and database on my own but if there are already some tools out there, I would prefer to use them. Actually, there are many other things in this museum's archive so it would be great to find some type of cataloging application.
If properly stored, how long should the original slides last? If I can't do the crowdsource as described above I am considering putting all of the slides into Print File transparency pages and doing my best to categorize them by at least one characteristic. That would at least allow me to reduce the number of slides we want to scan in. Unfortunately it would keep us from putting out all of the content to the public. While there may only be a few slides that we are interested in, it is likely that
Thank you,
B34N
My first inclination was to assign each slide an index number, quickly scan them in (low resolution and little to no post processing), store them in slide boxes by index number and then put the images on the web to use crowdsourcing to identify the content in the slides. This archive is of vintage race cars at various events so it is the type of thing that enthusiasts would enjoy helping to identify and assign meta data such as the make/model of car, event, driver and other identifying characteristics. The main roadblock that I came to was trying to find an effective way to get these slides into digital form. The quality and resolution is not an issue as all we need is something of good enough quality to identify the content. Later on we would go back and select a subset of slides to be professionally scanned and processed. I suspect that while we are starting with a few thousand slides, we would initially only want a hundred or so to be digitally reproduced at a professional level. Any thoughts or suggestions on this approach? I was going to try to develop the website and database on my own but if there are already some tools out there, I would prefer to use them. Actually, there are many other things in this museum's archive so it would be great to find some type of cataloging application.
If properly stored, how long should the original slides last? If I can't do the crowdsource as described above I am considering putting all of the slides into Print File transparency pages and doing my best to categorize them by at least one characteristic. That would at least allow me to reduce the number of slides we want to scan in. Unfortunately it would keep us from putting out all of the content to the public. While there may only be a few slides that we are interested in, it is likely that
Thank you,
B34N
cabbiinc
Slightly Irregular
I would say handle the slides as little and as few times as possible. I'm in the process of scanning my father in law's slides from the 80s and I'm dealing with a number of slides with mold on them, so I'd say act now but do it right.
As for the cataloging and crowd sourcing I have no experience with that. You may have a look at the Library of Congress/Flickr partnership and see if anything can be gleened from it.
http://blog.flickr.net/en/2008/01/16/many-hands-make-light-work/
http://www.flickr.com/commons/institutions/
As for the cataloging and crowd sourcing I have no experience with that. You may have a look at the Library of Congress/Flickr partnership and see if anything can be gleened from it.
http://blog.flickr.net/en/2008/01/16/many-hands-make-light-work/
http://www.flickr.com/commons/institutions/