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Documentation on Website's Development
Christy Richards
INLS 210-046
April 1st, 2003
Dr. Tibbo
Introduction
Selection Decisions
Or was it?
I still had to choose what artwork to digitize. His artistic output could be categorized into several broad categories: drawings, photographs, wood sculptures, ceramics, digital art, and miscellaneous three-dimensional art. I immediately eliminated the categories of wood sculpture, ceramics, and other three-dimensional art. For me to digitize these images, I would have had to take digital photographs and then put them up on the web. Because I don't have long-term access to a digital camera, the point was moot. This left me with three possibilities: drawings, photography, and digital art. Although my brother's real strength lies within digital art, I eventually decided against including anything on my website because I didn't know any information about the images to produce successful metadata. Also, I got the distinct impression that the purpose of the project was to digitize, not to work with born-digital formats. Thus, my decision was made: I would select drawings and photographs.
From that point, selection was easy. I knew that I needed some sort of text, so I went through some of the stories that Matthew had illustrated for me as a child. I found a good selection from "Life on Planet X", so I chose that. I then went through a binder of his childhood drawings and pulled out those that best showcased his imagination. At last, I went through his photographic portfolio, pulling out selected images that I thought would be most visually appealing to viewers.
On an interesting note, I did actually come upon a copyright debate in my selection process. Originally, I had selected one of Matthew's childhood drawing that depicted a group of Civil War soldiers fighting during a battle. My brother had been a big fan of the Civil War, so I thought adding this image to the project would show his diversity. I digitized it, appended metadata and put it up on the web. However, 2 days before this project was due, my brother informed me that he had traced that image out of a Civil War book. It was not his original artwork at all. Because of this, I had to remove the image and put another in its place. I came to realize that even something as straightforward as children's drawings could have copyright issues.
Digitization Decisions
The original purpose of choosing the text images was to experiment with OCR software. However, my handwriting showing up as garbled language when I ran it through OCR, so I was forced to transcribe the text. I transcribed directly into my website authoring window, because if I had tried writing it in a Word Processor, the automatic spellcheck would have corrected many of the typos and grammatical errors that riddle the document.
Digitization Process
For all the images, I scanned at 600dpi. I had talked with several friends who scanned images on a frequent basis, and they said that 600 was pretty standard, and anything less than 300 was generally frowned upon. Because I wanted to preserve the clarity of these images, I took their advice and scanned at a high resolution. However, at the time I received their advice, I had already scanned in the text images for "Life on Planet X" at the standard 200 dpi. Although I considered rescanning these at a higher resolution, I decided against it, because the images look fine as they are. Moreover, they are just a sample from the story. If I ever chose to scan the entire story, I would do so using a higher resolution.
Once I had finished making these adjustments to the image, and once I had recorded the metadata for that image, I would save the image as a .TIF file. Eventually all of these .TIF files would be burned on 2 CD-R's for my own personal files.
Once all the images were scanned, I went back and opened the digital master .TIF in the program Kodak Imaging. I saved the image as a .JPEG and changed the resolution to 200 dpi. This automatically compressed the file by 10%. Then, I went into Adobe Photoshop and decreased the size of the image. The size of the item, as scanned, was too large for a web browser window. Once I found a decent size, I saved the image under a different name. I then returned to my Metadata File and entered the new information about this image: the pixel size of the image; the new dpi; the bit-depth; and the file-extension were all added at this point.
This stage of the image
is what appears on my website as a close-up. Using this version of the
image, I then generated thumbnails to go on the site. Once all of this
was completed, I uploaded these images to the web.
Challenges of Metadata Creation
I suppose my confusion comes from the fact that I don't know how much of the metadata is supposed to reflect the digital master .TIF and how much metadata is supposed to refer to the .JPEG version of the image.
Conclusion