Digitization at UVic Libraries
Digitization at UVic Libraries
Have you ever bought a book and discovered that some of the pages are still connected to each other? Typically, this will happen along the top edge of four pages and many years ago, books were sold as such so that people knew it was a new book and not second hand.
When we are working with fragile, irreplaceable material, it’s critical that the object is properly supported during image capture. Sometimes, this means I have to jury-rig something suitable and every time one of my configurations works it’s deeply satisfying.
There are few things that get a book or theatre nerd’s heart rate up faster than the words “Shakespeare Folio” so imagine my delight when I was told I’d be scanning three of them. The volumes are not owned by our institution, and there was a fair bit of behind the scenes negotiations to get them here. Once they were in the building it was our single highest priority to get them done.
Having seen what he could do with the scans we did of his textured paintings, artist Shawn Shepherd came back to us late last summer with another request. He had a little man in a hat – kind of a businessman/salaryman/everyman that he wanted to manipulate into larger size sculptures. It had been the top of a trophy and my first question was, “Is it shiny?”
Today I was able to sit down with one of my favourite artifacts in the UVic Libraries Special Collections: a cuneiform tablet that is roughly 4000 years old. Compare 600dpi photos to the 0.3mm 3D scan of the object.
Have you ever considered the applications of a 3D scanner? As the technology becomes more widely available, 3D scanners are being used for everything from engineering to art. In our case, we’ve been tasked with archiving a portion of the Ian Cowan collection.
Apologies for the clickbait title but I wanted your attention to turn to this wonderful resource we’ve been able to add to the Libraries digital collection with the help of the Victoria Police Historical Society. The Victoria Police Department Charge Books collection includes several charge books, a complaint book, and three mugshot books from the late 1800s and early 1900s.
I am neither a map cataloger (one of several specialized areas within cataloging) nor a geographer, but one of the perks of my job is the opportunity to work with a huge variety of material, including maps, both historical and contemporary. Recently I have been able to help contribute to these projects through adding metadata (descriptive information) to the images.
When we are scanning, things generally go pretty smoothly but once in a while, they don’t. Whether the imperfections are part of the object in-hand or are introduced by human or equipment error, the results can still be interesting.
While the majority of the material we digitize is in English, a significant number of items are not. The language used makes no difference in the image capturing and editing stages but it may require different decisions to direct the rest of the process. A translation can offer much greater access to a resource, it may also mean coordinating with scholars or language experts outside the library.