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Showing posts from September, 2014

To crop or not to crop? Preparing images for page turning applications

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How do you prepare digital images of physical archive volumes for display within a web-based page turning application? I thought this was going to be a fairly straight forward question when I was faced with it a couple of months ago. Over the summer I have been supervising an internship project with the goal of finalising a set of exisiting digital images for display within a page turning application. The images were digital surrogates of the   visitation records for the Archdeaconry of York between 1598 and 1690 (for more information about these records see our project page on the Borthwick website ). I soon realised that there are many ways of approaching this problem and few standard answers. Google is normally my friend but googling the problem surfaced only guidelines geared towards particular tools and technologies - not the generic guides to good practice in this area that I was hoping for. Page turning for digital versions of modern books is fairly straightforward. They will be

Physical diaries versus digital calendars - a digital perspective

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This summer as part of our annual staff festival I had the chance to play at being a ‘real’ archivist. Coming to work at a traditional archive through a digital route with no formal archives training means that there are many traditional archives activities that I have not had any experience of. It was great to have the chance to handle some physical archives as Borthwick staff embarked on a ‘mass list in’ of the Alan Ayckbourn archive. Given a couple of heavy brown archive boxes and a pencil (no pens please!) and paper I was tasked with creating a box list (essentially just a brief description of what the boxes contained) for a selection of Ayckbourn’s diaries. This proved to be an interesting way to spend a morning. My job doesn't take me into the strongrooms or searchroom very often and opportunities to handle physical archives are rare. Opening a box from the archives and lifting out the contents was reminiscent of my past career in archaeological fieldwork, in particular the e