Image Libraries and Digitisation
James Stevenson and Catherine Draycott, from the V&A and the Wellcome Trust Library gave very informative talks about dealing with images in museums for my UCL course.
V&A images can be searched here:
The Wellcome here:
What was particularly interesting was how complicated a full picture library set up was - with photographers, researchers, curators, administrators, finance and contract aspects.
Also, the Wellcome and the V&A have interests in widening use of their images, so their licenses are not as constrictive or as expensive as one might imagine. The Wellcome make use of 'Creative Commons' licenses for example, which allows use of their images for non-commercial uses.
From a small museum point of view, I think the following issues arose:
1. A picture library requires very high quality images - one should aim for a resolution that a printer can use to create a A3 reproduction at 300 dpi. This may take up 50mb of storage.
2. The original scan or photgraph should be kept, archived and not directly manipulated. This can mean keeping the RAW file if the camera allows this - but RAW files are not stable so the V&A for example, do not keep them but keep the tiff which is a conservative medium.
So store permanently a tiff (or a png I have read) these are lossless formats, jpgs are lossy which means each time the file is edited and saved some data is irretrievably lost.
3. Make copies from the tiff and store as jpg for everyday use - 3 copies should be made, large, medium and thumbnail - sizes 1 mb, 400 kb and 35 kb respectively.
4. Use a colour target when making the original photo - this is a reference card that is put next to the original manufactured to allow calibration of colour.
5. Decide upon a license system - perhaps using creative commons, and when distributing images use a water marking system to allow tracking of use of that image.
6. Charging should be calculated on audience, prominence, status of loaner.
For digitisation projects really good advice can be found at www.tasi.ac.uk
ict
V&A images can be searched here:
The Wellcome here:
What was particularly interesting was how complicated a full picture library set up was - with photographers, researchers, curators, administrators, finance and contract aspects.
Also, the Wellcome and the V&A have interests in widening use of their images, so their licenses are not as constrictive or as expensive as one might imagine. The Wellcome make use of 'Creative Commons' licenses for example, which allows use of their images for non-commercial uses.
From a small museum point of view, I think the following issues arose:
1. A picture library requires very high quality images - one should aim for a resolution that a printer can use to create a A3 reproduction at 300 dpi. This may take up 50mb of storage.
2. The original scan or photgraph should be kept, archived and not directly manipulated. This can mean keeping the RAW file if the camera allows this - but RAW files are not stable so the V&A for example, do not keep them but keep the tiff which is a conservative medium.
So store permanently a tiff (or a png I have read) these are lossless formats, jpgs are lossy which means each time the file is edited and saved some data is irretrievably lost.
3. Make copies from the tiff and store as jpg for everyday use - 3 copies should be made, large, medium and thumbnail - sizes 1 mb, 400 kb and 35 kb respectively.
4. Use a colour target when making the original photo - this is a reference card that is put next to the original manufactured to allow calibration of colour.
5. Decide upon a license system - perhaps using creative commons, and when distributing images use a water marking system to allow tracking of use of that image.
6. Charging should be calculated on audience, prominence, status of loaner.
For digitisation projects really good advice can be found at www.tasi.ac.uk
ict
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