Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Today I finished scanning the slides of opera productions. I'm including an image from a 2001 production of Madame Butterfly. It looks like it was a really beautiful show! To give you an idea of the level of detail in the actual scans we're creating for the opera department, that image is saved at 400 dpi (it's been shrunk a little even from that for this blog--click on it to see it at 400 dpi). The full-sized scans are 2400 dpi.

Now that the opera project is complete, I'll be working on scanning images of IU basketball games and players for the new basketball practice facility near Assembly Hall. The lobby of the practice facility will include exhibits on basketball throughout IU's history, so we are finding and scanning images to be used in the exhibits.

The previous negatives I'd worked with were all 35mm, but many of the basketball images are 120mm. The process for scanning them is basically the same, but they are scanned at 1400 dpi rather than 2400 dpi, since they are larger.

Tracking down the images for these basketball exhibits can be a pretty elaborate process. We're given the names of players and games of which the athletic department would like to have pictures, and then we try to locate appropriate images. Photographs in which each subject is identified, such as photographs of the entire team or individual portraits, can be located relatively easily by searching the IU Archives' "Ask Sam" database, but action shots of particular players are a little more difficult to find. Brad keeps the media guides released each year for the sports played at IU, and we have a guide put together by a local IU basketball enthusiast that lists by season every basketball game played at IU with the date and final score for each game, as well as all the people on the team that season with their jersey numbers. It's a really fantastic tool.

When someone wants images of a particular player, we use this guide to determine what years he played and what his jersey number was. Photographic Services photographed IU home games, so we go to the files of reference prints in the Photographic Services sports collection, and start going through the file for each year during which the player was on the team to locate the photographs of basketball games. These reference prints often contain many images on one sheet, so we use a loupe (a kind of magnifier) to examine each image for good shots of that player, whom we identify by his jersey number. It can be pretty painstaking work. I spent part of my day today going through photographs of games from the 1960s looking for good images of two particular players.

Tomorrow we're supposed to get a new computer and scanner installed, so it should be an exciting day!