Wednesday, January 20 and Monday, January 25, 2010

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

On Wednesday, I finished going through the Biology and Botany prints and negatives, transferred all the information on those prints to the negative envelopes, and sleeved the negatives. I'll be doing this throughout my internship in preparation for the new database, into which we should be able to start entering images from the Photographic Services collection in mid-February, according to the Digital Library Program.

Photographic Services (or Photoservices), an Indiana University service which provides photographers for university events and creates large, high-quality prints of images, today exists as IU Photographics.

I also continued working on locating negatives for the basketball project. This time I was looking at images of men's basketball from the 1960s and 1970s.


Monday, January 25, 2010

Today, I continued scanning negatives of men's basketball from the 1970s. I worked on locating images of a particular player. In general, we will try to work from a student's final year on the team backwards to his or her earlier years, since the best shots of players are usually taken during their later years on the team.

As part of the ongoing preparation for the new database, I also pulled the Photoservices prints and negatives of the construction of Beck Chapel, transferred the information from the prints to the negative envelopes, and sleeved the negatives.

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!

First Week

I started my internship at Indiana University's Office of University Archives and Records Management on Monday, January 11th. For the rest of the semester, I will be spending my Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday mornings working under the supervision of the Photograph Curator, Brad Cook. Most of my previous archival experience is in processing collections containing few photographs, so this internship will give me an opportunity to learn more about working with photographs, slides, and negatives, as well as methods for digitizing those materials. My work will include pulling materials for researchers, scanning those materials, and adding metadata to digital images. I will also be learning about how to fulfill researcher requests for materials and how to handle requests for permission to publish images from the collections of the University Archives.

The Indiana University Archives photographs collections are located in an office one floor above the main office, so on Monday morning I headed upstairs, where Brad gave me a tour of the space and an orientation to the largest collections. The collections include photographs, slides, negatives, and reference prints for some of the negatives. I spent the rest of my time that day filing envelopes of photographs, reference prints, and negatives to familiarize myself with the location and organization of each of the main collections. I'll be spending a little time each day refiling these envelopes of materials requested by researchers.

On Tuesday, I started working on fulfilling my first request. Since the request came from a university department and is submitted every year, my supervisor gave me permission to write about it in some detail.

It came from the Indiana University Opera department, which requests images of previous opera productions each year in preparation for publicizing the upcoming season. After I located all the negatives that the department had asked for, Brad showed me how to scan them and use Photoshop to remove dust specks from the images. On Wednesday, I scanned and retouched the rest of the negatives myself. I loved the production of Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) put on by Indiana University last November, so it was a treat for me to get to see images of previous productions. It looks like they've put on a lot of really fantastic shows!

The first week of my internship went really well, and I'm looking forward to my next! I think this internship will be fun and will provide me with some really great experience in an area of archival work that I know little about.