What’s the most efficient method for nearly choking a small digitization shop? Success. That’s something we’re experiencing at The University of Montana and we couldn’t be happier. Over the summer, the library partnered with Dave Beck of Native American Studies on a trip to the National Archives to scan documents from their Central Classified Files centering on the Blackfeet Agency during the period from 1907 – 1935 (Record Group 75.) We were pleasantly surprised by the amount of material that our two (very organized) graduate students were able to come back with: 15,000 images taken in a little under four weeks. We’re in the process now of ingesting the material into our digital collection to make them widely available eventually, but in the meantime I thought I’d share the equipment used on the trip.
Testing the camera setup before sending to DC in 2009.
Equipment List:
- Camera: Canon Rebel XSI
- Lens: Canon EF-S 18-55 IS (both came as a kit)
- Tripod: Manfrotto 055X Pro with a center post that fold out horizontally
- Tripod Head: 484RC2 Mini Ball
- Laptop: Dell 131L (one of our circulating laptops for students)
- Carrying Case: Pelican 1300
- Glass bubble level that is attached to the hot shoe
- Seagate 500GB extermal hard drive
- Total cost: Approximately $1,400
The camera was driven by the laptop which previewed the image being captured. The images were saved to the external hard drive and then FTP’d back to the library on a nightly basis. All images were captured as RAW files, and will be converted before being made live. Here’s an example of the quality of image the students came back with. The master image from which this example was derived is 4,272 x 2,878 pixels, the equivalent of a 240 PPI full color scan.
Example of a natural light capture
Post a Comment