Digitization
In past digitization projects, the Archives followed the guidelines and recommendations of the Western States Digital Imaging Best Practices Version 1.0. Because of our familiarity and success with Western States, the Archives will continue to follow these standards with this project. Staff will scan master files of individual documents in TIFF (maps) and PDF (Annual Reports and Contracts) formats and stored them in a relational database on a web accessible server. As recommended by Western States, staff will scan all manuscript documents (except the maps) in grayscale at 300 dpi using lossless compression. The reports and contracts are all typed, single page and will not require duplex scanning. The maps require 24-bit color scans to capture color used to present and identify different types of information. Although this level of scanning will take up more server space, the coloring is crucial to understanding the information presented by the maps.
Northern Michigan University maintains an exceptional technical and institutional infrastructure to support this project. We have decided to conduct this project in-house rather than use an outside commercial vendor. First, no commercial vendor with the required technical capability operates in the Marquette area. Second, Northern Michigan University maintains most of the required hardware and software needed to complete the project. The project will make use of following existing equipment for the digital scanning of the documents:
- Lenovo ThinkPad R61, Lenovo ThinkPad SL410, Lenovo ThinkCentre computers
- Xerox 510 Wide Format Printer (map scanner)
- HP ScanJet 3500C Digital Flatbed Scanner: 1200 dpi optical resolution, 48-bit color depth, 8.5 x 11.7, USB connection, connected to an IBM computer.
- 2 Plustek OpticPro A320 Digital Flatbed Scanners: 1600dpi optical resolution, 48-bit color depth, 12x17, USB connection, connected to IBM computers.
- Adobe Creative Suite 5, for the original scans (TIFF) and conversion to PDF, as well as necessary document processing.
- Adobe Acrobat 9 (or current) to simplify document processing by enabling the reliable and efficient exchange of documents using Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF)
The TIFF, PDF master files, and project web site reside on the following server:
- IBM System x3250 M2
- Core 2 Duo E7400 2.8GHz/1066MHz/3MB
- 4 GB ram
- Two IBM 300GB 6GBps SAS 2.5 HDDs
- Hotswap SAS Kit 2.5, Primary Array RAID 1
- Gigabit Ethernet
- Windows Server 2008 OS
- MySQL 5.0.67 database server
