Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Today I continued working on filling the patron request for the opera images. This time I scanned slides of the same productions from yesterday. I also continued working on transferring information from the backs the the Photoservices prints to the negative envelopes in preparation for entering the information into the new database and putting the negatives into sleeves.

Monday, March 1

I started today by scanning a few negatives of a football game and a football player for the Hall of Champions, another sports exhibit which is being installed on the Indiana University campus. This project will require images of all university sports rather than just basketball.

I also continued working on going through the Photoservices contact sheets and transferring the information from the contact sheets to the negative envelopes in preparation for scanning these negatives and entering them into the new photographs database.

Today I worked on images of the construction of the Herman B. Wells Library. It was really interesting to see areas I walk through every day under construction! Here you can see a photograph taken on August 3rd, 1967 of a partially completed Main Library. This is a scan of the contact sheet. Once all the negatives have been scanned, the images added to the new photographs database, and the information entered into the database, these prints will no longer be needed except for exhibit purposes.

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Today I continued working on scanning negatives and slides of women's basketball for the exhibits in the basketball practice facility, which is scheduled to open sometime in March. So far, I have scanned all the images of women's basketball from 1972 to the beginning of 1976 that looked like they might be acceptable for use in the exhibit.



Since it takes time for each batch of negatives and slides to scan, I continued working on transferring information from the Photosevices collection prints to the negative envelopes while the scanner was working. This time I was working on a folder of prints showing the construction of a power plant on campus.

The new computer and scanner have also been installed in the photo archives (see pictures at right). I haven't used the new scanner yet, but it is supposed to be better for scanning slides. Also, now that we have three workstations, we will be able to work on projects requiring the use the Ask Sam database while the other computer and scanner are occupied with scanning. (No other programs can be used while images are being scanned.)

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!

Monday, January 18, 2010

Today I learned how to scan slides, which was pretty similar to scanning negatives. Most of the settings are the same--Color, transparency, 2400 dpi for the resolution--but the program has to be set to "positive" rather than "negative." The slides were a little easier to handle than the negatives, they scan more quickly, and they seem to attract less dust, so I had much less clean-up to do in Photoshop. However, the colors on some of the slides appeared a little dull and faded, so we sometimes increase the contrast a bit to make them look sharper. I was working on images of opera productions again, and I enjoyed seeing more pictures of previous shows. They've had some really beautiful sets and costumes.

I also started pulling some reference prints and negatives from the Indiana University Photoservices collection in preparation for entering scanned negatives into the new database we will start using soon. Since only the negatives will be scanned, we need to make sure all the information on the reference prints is also written on the envelopes of negatives so it can be included in the database. A lot of the reference prints have notes on the back about the subject of the photograph.

Today I worked on pulling negatives for the prints in one of the "Biology and Botany" folders, and Brad and I discussed some of the strange images that appear in older collections of photo-archives, particularly in photographs of experiments in science departments. I'm a little nervous at the prospect of running across images of animal experiments in some of the earlier photographs. Fortunately, the folder I was working with had nothing more unusual than some images from the 1930s of what looked like mold growing in Petri dishes. Most of the images are either portraits of faculty or show students and faculty at work, often surrounded by racks of test tubes. It's a fascinating glimpse of some of IU's science programs in the 1930s and 1940s.