Intro to Digitizing Photos for Cultural Heritage (A5)

Digitizing cultural heritage photographs creates exciting opportunities for accessing and sharing collections. It may also be a smart preservation strategy for materials at risk from age and deterioration. However, it entails unique challenges, dovetails with other considerations, costs money, and may seem daunting to the novice. Penobscot Marine Museum has been digitizing photo collections since 2005. Through making mistakes, seeking out professional development, consulting colleagues, trying new approaches, and fundraising, we’ve built capacity and established a set of practices that align with our goals, current level of expertise, and budget. If you work for a museum, historical society, or other cultural heritage organization that’s planning a digital project for the first time, or you’re looking to improve your current program, this hands-on course will help you lay the groundwork to get started. Please note that we’ll demonstrate workflows with our existing hardware and software to provide sample use cases. The quality and performance of both is very good, and the costs are reasonable. Of course, there are other options which participants can explore on their own.

Topics Covered:

• Assessing the project
• Shopping for Gear
• Software Options
• Show Me the Money
• The Digital Darkroom
• On Targets
• Best Capture, Best Practice
• Software and Hardware Settings
• Image File Considerations
• Overview of Next Steps: Describing, Sharing, Storing

Program Benefits:

• Learn how to plan a successful photo digitization project using methodical steps
• Helpful technology recommendations from experienced professionals
• Tips on fundraising
• Practical intro to using hardware and software
• Overview of what to do with digital collections
• Links to additional resources