Back in December and January, I wrote four blog posts about the issues surrounding the scanning of the Hugh Morton collection, in particular the estimated 200,000 slides. The silence afterward may lead you to believe that nothing more has happened on that front. Actually it has been quite the opposite!

In the last installation of the series, I mentioned we would investigate the purchase of a Kodak HR 500 or a HR Universal film scanner. In late February and early March, we took delivery on a Universal along with three accessories pulled together from various parts of the planet. The scanner comes equipped with “film gates,” devices used for scanning individual negatives or slides.

This scanner is not, however, designed for one-off scanning; it is a production workhorse. The used scanner we purchased—Kodak discontinued the product line in 2005—is in great condition even after having made more than 1,000,000 scans in its lifetime. For production mode, the scanner uses “AutoStrip Gates” for cut strips of 120 or 35mm roll film (usually into lengths of four to six frames) and an “AutoSlide” accessory for 35mm slides, all manufactured by Halse Imaging Systems in England. We purchased a brand new 120 strip gate from Halse, while the 35mm strip gate (from the USA) and the slide unit (from Holland) are used. The AutoSlide accepts Kodak slide carousels that hold 80, 35mm slides.

Since the slides are the component of the collection on which I have focused, I leapt eagerly into the . . . .

Oh boy! To make a long saga short, the AutoSlide accessory didn’t work from the very first day. After three visits from the Kodak repair man in consultation with Kodak repair HQ and an exchange of email to England, we decided to ship the unit to Rochester where they could compare its operation with working units on hand. Last Friday, after days and days and days of struggling, angst (I am not exaggerating), and detriment to my other responsibilities, the AutoSlide lived up to its billing. I loaded the carousel, hit the “go” button, and it worked flawlessly, generating nearly 600 scans during a day with a few interruptions and a couple meetings. A fully loaded carousel can be scanned in half an hour. For the techno crowd, those scans are 18MB TIFFs, 24-bit, with a pixel array of approximately 2000 x 3000 pixels. That 3000 pixels across the long dimension meets the “alternative minimum” in the National Archives and Records Administration guidelines described in part four of the 200,000 slides series.

So now I’ve got a lot of scans on my hands, which means more posts in the offing to discuss what we’ll be doing with them. Elizabeth will be so happy that I can get back to my share of writing!

This post was written by John Blythe, a Digital Curation Fellow in UNC’s School of Library and Information Science and a member of the Digital Libraries class just wrapping up their Morton project. Here’s a brief bio of John provided by SILS:

John Blythe, a native of Chapel Hill and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill alumnus, came to the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) following an 18-year career in journalism that included stints as a Web editor, radio producer and newspaper reporter. His interest in digital curation and preservation grew out of an encounter with a box of old tapes made by his grandfather [LeGette Blythe] during a long career as a newspaperman and writer in North Carolina.

As a native Chapel Hillian, a UNC alum and a Tar Heel basketball fan, I was used to seeing Hugh Morton sitting cross-legged on the sidelines at the Smith Center (and at its predecessor Carmichael Auditorium) snapping photos of men’s basketball games. I also knew that Morton and his family owned Grandfather Mountain. On several occasions as a teenager, I joined the freckled and pale-skinned masses who mount an annual July pilgrimage to the mountain’s MacRae Meadows (which bears the name of Morton’s maternal ancestors) to celebrate all things Scottish at the Highland Games.

But it wasn’t until I joined with five of my library science school classmates in digitizing some of Morton’s photos that I realized how prolific a photographer he was. More than 500,000 images! I was also surprised to learn how long photography had been one of Morton’s passions. And what a chronicler of UNC he was. As we digitized we found negative after negative of UNC students, some candid and some posed. There was the series of photos taken either in McCorkle Place or Polk Place of a male student reclining in the grass joined by a changing group of women. Posed? Yes. They had the look of a clothing ad you’d find among the inserts in a Sunday newspaper. I thought, “Who is this guy? How did he manage to attract so many women? And why wasn’t I so lucky during my undergrad days?”

There was another negative. This one appeared to be candid. Taken of a dorm, it featured some young women lounging on the roof of an enclosed porch. The negative was overexposed and tested my newfound digitization skills. “Remember what Stephen said,” I told myself. “Increase the contrast here. Put a little more shadow there.” As I followed these steps, my mind wandered. I was taken back to the Chapel Hill of my youth. It was a hot summer day. We were driving home from swimming lessons at Bowman Gray Indoor Pool. And there, as I looked out the window, was the porch and the dorm. Was it Spencer dorm? Alderman? McIver? Kenan? The image wasn’t clear enough in my head. Briefly there was the nostalgia for the old, the dislike of change and the sentimentality for the Chapel Hill we used to call “The Village.” But the photo also summoned back happy memories. The relaxed feel of a six-year-old whose summer is filled with possibilities and few limitations. There’s the chance to play. And play again. There’s summer nights of “Kick the Can” and “No Bears Out Tonight.” And going barefoot all day.

As a budding archivist, I’m learning that documentation is important. We need to know what dorm is featured in the photo. We should provide the names of the happy couples reclining in the grass. Mr. Morton, it seems, liked to take photos more than he liked to record who was in them. As Stephen and Elizabeth have told us, they’re dependent on you (the reader) to help us with that documentation. That’s the professional speaking. But, speaking personally, as someone whose memories of Chapel Hill now span five decades, I’m just as happy to look at these photos and imagine. That’s the Hugh Morton I’ve now come to know—a man who’s provided the opportunity to get away from daily responsibilities and daydream.

—John Blythe

If there’s one thing “A View to Hugh” has made clear, it’s that every photograph has a story behind it—especially if it was taken by Hugh Morton. My recent visit with Hugh’s wife Julia, daughters Judy and Catherine, and grandson Crae really impressed this point upon me. Mrs. Morton could barely finish telling me one story before launching into another (I tried to take notes, but eventually gave up). I do remember one set of photos she mentioned, of the “Cat Girl,” a New Orleans burlesque performer Hugh went to see on one of his trips to the Sugar Bowl with the Charlie Justice team in 1947. Here she is:

The website FrenchQuarter.com has a tidbit about “exotic dancer Lilly Christine the Cat Girl”—that must be her! According to Mrs. Morton, Hugh didn’t care for cheesecake photography, and “wasn’t good at it”—he was apparently pressured, against his will, to go see the Cat Girl by a group of friends that included then-mayor of Chapel Hill, Robert W. Madry.

This is just one example. As great as the stories are, the difficulty is that 500,000 images in the Morton collection equals a heck of a lot of stories—a lifetime’s worth, from a very full lifetime. (Using the “1,000 words” estimate, that’s 500 million words!!) Uncovering and documenting all these stories is one of the major processing challenges we face.

Fortunately, we have people to draw on, like Hugh’s family, friends, acquaintances, and other readers of this blog. And we have other sources, too, like one I just got around to looking at—that fabulous magazine The State (now known as Our State), in which Morton photos were very frequently featured. Here in the North Carolina Collection, we’re lucky enough to have not only the entire run of the magazine, but also subject indexes, and (thanks to some wonderful guy named Robert M. Topkins) a 1976 index to pictures appearing in The State.

Morton was friends with the original publisher Carl Goerch, as well as his successor Bill Sharpe, whom Morton has described as “the one person who most whetted my interest for making pictures of and for the state [of North Carolina].” This photo of Goerch, Sharpe, and Sharpe’s wife appeared on page 7 of the August 19, 1950 issue of The State, along with the text quoted below.

As you look at this picture you can almost guess the words that might have been spoken:

Says the lady: “You numbskull! You nit-wit! You’ve got no business on this beach. Now get yourself away from here just as quickly as you can, before I call a policeman. Git, I tell you; git!”

Says the man in the bathing trunks: “But lady, I didn’t mean any harm! Goodness knows I didn’t. When you were stooping over, picking up shells, I thought you were my wife. That’s the reason I spanked you.”

Says the lady: “I don’t want to hear anything further from you. On your way before I call a cop!”

Says the man with the marine cap, the dark glasses, the checkered shirt, the rolled-up trousers and the slightly protruding stomach: “That’s tellin’ him, mamma: that’s tellin’ him!”

The lady happens to be Mrs. Bill Sharpe. The man in the bathing trunks happens to be the editor of this publication. The man with the marine cap and all the other accessories, including the slightly protruding stomach, happens to be Bill Sharpe. And Hugh Morton of Wilmington just happened to be around just in time to take the picture.

I guess if you don’t know the story behind a picture, you can always make one up . . .

Philosopher William James visited Grandfather Mountain in 1891, calling the town of Linville “the most peculiar, and one of the most poetic places I have ever been in” (see The Letters of William James for James’ complete thoughts on his visit). Of the mountain he wrote, “The road, the forest, the view, the crags, were as good as such things can be….Later, doubtless, a railroad, stores, and general sordidness with wealth will creep in. Meanwhile let us enjoy things!”

Well, I’m happy to report that in the century or so since then, relatively little sordidness has been allowed to encroach. I visited Grandfather this past weekend with my family, where we were lucky enough to meet the Morton family and get a personalized, behind-the-scenes tour of the facilities and surroundings from Hugh’s grandson Crae, the current President. Growing up in Boone, obviously I had been there before—but it’s been years, and I’ve become far more accustomed to looking at the mountain in two dimensions only (at work). It’s far more impressive in three. (Especially impressive, but not recommended, is crossing the Mile High Swinging Bridge in winds gusting to 95 mph. “We’re about to close the bridge due to safety concerns,” they said . . .”but you can go across first.” Big mistake.)

There’s no question that Hugh Morton developed an amazing ability to photograph the mountain and its surroundings to their fullest advantage. Crae drove me around to several of Hugh’s best photographing spots, including his favorite tree in MacRae Meadows, the point from which you can sometimes catch a glimpse of the Charlotte skyline, and the rock from which he took those gorgeous shots of the Parkway. To illustrate my point, here’s a photo I took from the Viaduct rock:

And, here’s one of Morton’s photos of the Viaduct, which I borrowed from Go Blue Ridge Card blog (I’m sure it’s around here somewhere . . .):

Obviously, it helps to go at certain times of the year. But it also helps to be patient and persistent, as Hugh was (photographing from the same spots over and over again, waiting for lighting and cloud placement to be exactly right). And, Crae let me in on another secret—sometimes Hugh would recruit (or coerce) a volunteer to position the foliage just so, to achieve maximum framing effect. Who knows, maybe just outside the frame of this very image there is a young Crae Morton, straining on his tiptoes to hold up those leafy branches in the foreground while his grandfather snaps the shutter . . .

The image above (© 2008 Winston-Salem Journal photo/David Rolfe), which shows Stephen at the computer and me (Elizabeth “The Flash” Hull) operating the scanner, is from a recent article in the Winston-Salem Journal (2/17/2008 issue) about our work on the Morton collection (on the article page, scroll down to the “Multimedia” link to view more images, including some of Morton’s that you haven’t yet seen on A View to Hugh). (Note: as of 5/9/2008, the article no longer appears to be available online).

Yes, digitization of the Morton collection has begun . . . sort of. As you may have read in Stephen’s recent post, students from the digital libraries class are hard at work scanning black-and-white sheet film negatives—about 60 scans and counting so far—and the Library’s Digital Production Center should start on other parts of the collection soon.

This way of doing things—scanning the collection in the middle of archival processing, rather than after it’s finished—is somewhat unorthodox and presents a number of challenges, especially in terms of how to maintain control over 1) the physical items in the collection (the actual negatives, prints, etc.), 2) the electronic versions we’re creating, and 3) the relationships between them.

We feel strongly about using this method, however, for a few reasons. The first, of most immediate importance to me, is that scanning will actually help me process the collection. I don’t know if you’ve ever sorted through a chaotic pile of 50,000 unlabeled negatives before (I’m guessing not), but for even the most seasoned negative-reader, it can be hard to tell what you’re looking at. Having positive versions in an electronic format will be incredibly useful for categorizing and identification.

The second reason we want to do “mass digitization” of the Morton collection is so that we can make as much of it available as quickly as possible. This fits with a growing trend in the library/archives community, as shown by the report Shifting Gears: Gearing Up to Get Into the Flow published by Online Computer Library Center (OCLC). (This report was inspired by an all-day program entitled “Digitization Matters: Breaking Through the Barriers—Scaling Up Digitization of Special Collections,” attended by Stephen, at the Society of American Archivists annual meeting last August. Stephen’s series “200,000 slides” on this blog stems from ideas presented at that program).

The Shifting Gears report challenges libraries and archives to shift the focus of digitization away from “boutique” projects that either highlight marquee collections or “cherry-pick” from collections, scanning images at a very high resolution, describing them in great detail, and leaving the bulk of the archival holdings on the shelf where only in-person visitors can see them. Increasingly, the consensus is that we should be moving towards methods that emphasize access over preservation, aim for quantity over quality, and that let the user decide which “cherries” s/he wants to pick.

If this all sounds confusing, that’s because it is! We’re figuring it out as we go along. Ideas, advice, sympathy, encouragement, etc. are welcome as always.

We’re immensely pleased to announce that A View to Hugh was named “Best Use of Web 2.0 Technologies” in the first annual Best Archives on the Web awards. The awards are hosted by the widely-read and always excellent blog ArchivesNext, which focuses on the future of archives—especially archival institutions’ use of emerging technologies. If so inclined, you may read the judges’ rationale for selecting our blog as the winner (over such venerable institutions as the Library of Congress!).

Kudos should go to ArchivesNext for highlighting new and exciting projects like ours . . . but they should also go to YOU, the readers of A View to Hugh, who have participated so usefully and enthusiastically since we launched this blog a mere 4 months ago. Please continue to read, question, and comment—your knowledge, opinions and anecdotes are invaluable as we continue to experiment with new ways of working with the “old stuff” of archives.

In honor of what would have been Hugh Morton’s 87th birthday today, I decided to share this set of self-portraits I recently stumbled upon—the only images in the collection I can remember seeing that are both of and by Morton. I love how they capture multiple sides of his personality—the fun, happy Hugh on top, and the Hugh on the bottom that you probably don’t want to mess with.

Dating probably from the late 1930s, these negatives are a somewhat unusual format: a non-perforated roll film with an image area measuring 1 1/4-inch by 1 1/2-inch (or 30 x 40mm). Most of the negatives of this format in the collection are deteriorating such that the film has turned blue, with blue splotches throughout.

Some quick research had led me to think that this might be film for a Kodak 35, the first 35mm camera made by Kodak. Since Morton so conveniently included his camera in the shots, we have more evidence to draw from. Unfortunately, these shots are largely out of focus, and while the camera looks pretty similar to the Kodak 35, it doesn’t look exactly like any of the models I can find online (specifically, the silver plate with squared corners behind the lens doesn’t look right). And, of course, the film size isn’t right either; the only film format I can find that meets the 30 x 40mm dimension requirement is 127. Could this be a half-frame 127 camera?

To further complicate matters, I see in David Horvath’s extremely useful Acetate Negative Survey that, “In Agfa/Ansco products, a blue anti-halation dye which was converted to a luco base during processing was used. It is generally colorless but is turned blue again by the action of mold or acids. Many degraded Agfa/Ansco negatives exhibit this distinctive blue color.” So, this leads me to wonder if this is an early Agfa/Ansco camera—but again, I can’t find any matching models online, and the film maker and the camera maker don’t have to be the same.

As usual, I’ve gotten way more wrapped up in this than I intended to. Any insight from you vintage camera buffs, or from other archivists who may have seen this format before?

When faced with a problem for which the solution cannot be reached with the resources on-hand, there are two options: outsource the job or acquire the necessary resources to do it yourself. Ah . . . the makings of today’s (long) blog post!

There aren’t too many places “out there” that can scan vast quantities of slides. One company I know that does is a vendor I met a few years ago at a professional conference. I called them to see what services they could provide for scanning 200,000 slides. We talked through the project in the largest and broadest sense. They kindly agreed to investigate what such an undertaking might cost in a non-binding estimate. We sought price estimates based upon two parameters: scans measuring 3,000 and 4,000 pixels “on the long side.” When archivists talk about the number of pixels on the long side, we are addressing the quality of the scan necessary to met a certain standard. So we need to digress for a bit to explain those standards.

Both the 3,000 and 4,000 figures appear in the United States National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) report, Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Archival Masters for Electronic Access: Creation of Production Master Files—Raster Images. We turned to this document a few years ago when trying to determine the level of quality we wanted to attain for the scans we provide to researchers who request reproductions from original material in the photographic archives. So before we proceed, a sidebar is needed in order to explain two important terms in NARA’s mouthful of a title: “production masters” and “raster images.”

At the risk of over-simplification—more details on this topic can be found readily on the Web—a raster image is one that has been created by scanning an analog image from side to side, top to bottom and then representing the image as rows of dots. With computer monitors, those dots are pixels (”picture elements”) and the number of those pixels per line relates to image resolution: the more pixels that represent the image, the higher its resolution.

“Production master” is a term used by NARA to describe raster image files “used for the creation of additional derivative files for distribution and/or display via a monitor and for reproduction purposes via hardcopy output at a range of sizes using a variety of printing devices.” In short, files meant to be used for access and reproduction. The important inherent distinction this definition makes is that the files are not “preservation masters.” Preservation masters are image files serving as surrogates meant to replace the original item.

Warning: math ahead!

The NARA guidelines for 35mm recommends 4,000 pixels across the longest dimension of the negative or slide, with 3,000 pixels as its “Alternative Minimum.” A 35mm negative is approximately 1 7/16 inches long, so 4,000 pixels divided by 1.4375 inches equals 2783 pixels per inch (ppi); lowered to 3,000 pixels, the ppi drops to 2,087. So using round figures, a production master from a 35mm negative or slide should have a resolution of 2,800 ppi, but no less than 2,100 ppi. By comparison, the Nikon Coolscan, which scans at 4,000 pixels per inch, produces scans in the neighborhood of 5,750 pixels on the long dimension.

But why is 4,000 pixels the benchmark? Well, I’ll spare you a double dose of math and say that 2,800 ppi resolution produces a good quality 8 x 10-inch inkjet print. The 8 x 10-inch photographic print was the de facto standard used by publishers before the digital imaging age, and NARA designed their guidelines to meet that equivalency.

(End of side bar).

The vendor estimated that their throughput at the 3,000-pixels specification, based upon prior experience, would be 125 scans per hour. That would be 5,000 slides a week or 200,000 slides in 40 weeks. Now that is a workable time frame! The cost, however, was not workable despite having significant funding available. Their charge was very reasonable per item, but the cost still came in at six figures—not too surprising, in retrospect, when you have 200,000 items. In summary, outsourcing a slide scanning project may be better suited to collections that are sizable but not nearly with the magnitude of Morton, or to institutions that do not have a viable, in fact burgeoning, digital library operation in place such as the UNC Library.

A question emerged in these deliberations. What equipment does that vendor have on-hand that enables it to achieve that level of throughput? They utilize Kodak’s Professional HR 500 film scanners paired with Halse slide carriers. Kodak made three industrial-level scanners for the professional photo lab marketplace. The HR 500 and its successor the HR 500 Plus handle roll film up to the 120 format (2 1/4 inches wide). Their sibling, the HR Universal, handles both roll films and sheet film up to 4 x 5 inches. The Halse carrier is designed to load slides into the scanner using the common Kodak Carousel slide tray that holds 80 slides.

The catch? (Isn’t there always something?!?!) Kodak discontinued manufacture of the scanners in October 2005 because, in their words, “with the decline in film capture, Pro Labs, in general, now have sufficient high-resolution productive scanning capacity.” In other words, professional photographers who used to shoot slides and color transparencies and then have them scanned by pro labs are now shooting all digital. Photographic archives, where many of those slides and negatives have or will end up, do not constitute a large enough market to warrant their continued production. So, now what?

Some Web searching fortunately led to an alternative source—there is a market for used professional machines and a broker who focuses on finding new homes for unwanted HR scanners. One buyer was Yale University’s ITS Media Services unit. An email to Joseph Szaszfai, manager of Photographic and Digital Imaging Services, and an ensuing phone conversation yielded very positive information with kudos such as, “There’s nothing equal to it.” Using two scanners, Yale generates 80 30MB files per hour per machine. At Yale’s production rate, 200,000 slides could be completed in 62.5 weeks. Again, impressive throughput. So impressive that we are looking to get one!

One of the best aspects of working in an academic library/archive is the proximity of and access to students. For one, you can hire them to help with some of the more tedious and repetitive aspects of archival processing! But more importantly, they get on-campus access to valuable hands-on learning opportunities—and you get the benefit of their technological skills and expertise, not to mention the energy and fresh perspective they bring to projects.

Luckily, UNC-Chapel Hill boasts one of the top graduate schools of Information and Library Science in the country (currently tied for #1 in the U.S. News and World Report!). This is especially good news for us at “A View to Hugh,” because we’ll be working this semester with UNC SILS professor Jeffrey Pomerantz and the members of his Digital Libraries class (a few of which are pictured above) to begin developing an online presence for the Hugh Morton collection. Our (overly ambitious?) goal is to have a prototype up and running by the end of the semester.

The class has met a few times and have already split themselves into nine intimidating-sounding working groups: Project Management, System Administration, Digitization, Standards, Metadata, Information Architecture, Services, Evaluation, and Preservation. We’re very excited about the project and will post regular updates about how it’s going. Perhaps we’ll even hear from some of the students themselves on this very blog (if they want a good grade, that is . . .).

There may be no way around it: describing, in a meaningful way, my experiments with batch scanning for mass digitization does not lend itself to short blog posts. One of the audiences we hope to reach with the Morton blog is practicing archivists, especially those exploring the realm of mass digitization. If you are not an archivist, or someone interested in scanning large quantities of material, I will not blame you if you stop reading here!

The second installation of this series on scanning slides for mass digitization discussed the issues with film scanners that produce high quality scans but at unacceptably slow speeds. Using the Nikon Coolscan film scanner was one of two approaches I explored with equipment on-hand. The second method investigated, the focus of this post, was the possible use of a good quality flatbed scanner—an Epson Expression 10000XL Photo model running Silverfast Ai scanning software, which has a batch scanning mode.

Using a flatbed scanner addresses the need to scan more than five slides at a time, a serious limiting factor for the Nikon Coolscan. (To be fair, the Coolscan was not designed for volume scanning.) The hope for the flatbed scanner was that in batch mode we might be able to produce image files that would be adequate for online access and basic reproduction requests at a higher rate of throughput. The 10000XL comes with two slide holders that, in total, hold thirty slides; bypassing the holders and laying the slides directly on the flatbed expands that number to forty-eight. Note that laying slides on a scanner’s flatbed only works if the scanner has an adjustable focusing mechanism, because not all slide mounts are the same thickness and the film does not rest on the surface of the flatbed. A fixed-focus scanner, therefore, may produce out-of-focus scans.

My test sample was a varied batch of slides from the 1950s and 1960s that has two sets of handwritten numbers on the mounts and were likely from slide presentations. This group represented a variety of subject matter, lighting conditions, film emulsions, and exposure latitudes (slightly overexposed to slightly underexposed).

I tried two methods: scanning each slide individually using the Silverfast batch mode, and scanning multiple slides as one large file. The scan above is a single image file of forty-eight slides laid out on the flatbed. The scan that follows, made from a different set of slides, uses Epson’s slide holders. (The scan below has two slide openings that are unfilled. That’s because I loaded the slides in numerical order, and two slides were missing.)

Silverfast’s batch mode requires the operator to draw a selection rectangle around each image, as seen in the detailed screen shot below. Though tedious, an advantage of selecting and then scanning individual frames is that an automatic or manual tonal and/or color adjustment can be applied to each slide. A disadvantage is that an automatic or manual tonal and/or color adjustment can be applied to each slide. Does that—being both an advantage and a disadvantage— sound like doublethink? Well, the added step to gain better image quality extends the amount of time it takes to set up each slide. A straight, unadjusted scan from the preview may be faster, but it’s usually not acceptable “as is.” Some tweaking of the preview scan—”preprocessing”—is required to get the final scan close to where you want it. You just can’t labor over it!

Note in the illustration above (made from a different set of slides) the dotted rectangular selection boxes. Note, too, the odd color cast that is the result of the film emulsion’s color dyes shifting over time. This is one reason why you need to make adjustments to raw scans, even if they are very close approximations of the original slides. Here’s an adjusted version, corrected after scanning (”post-processing”), of one of the images above:

One nice aspect about individual scans, however, is that once you click on the “Scan” button you can walk away from the scanner for forty-five minutes and do something else . . . like eat a hearty lunch.

Scanning multiple slides as one image file presents several dilemmas:

At what resolution do you scan the batch? I chose an equivalent of what the Nikon Coolscan would generate—4,000 pixels per inch. That creates a very large file, around 1.25 gigabytes for an 8-bit scan, for forty-eight slides. We experimented with downsizing the file to a presentable JPEG for Web display. Adequate, but it’s another layer of work that drags out the process. To reduce that workload, several steps could be set up as an “action” in Photoshop where the software records individual steps as a programmed script that can be applied to subsequent batches, even whole directories of image files. You just need to be meticulous to the point that the scans are made so they will look the way you want them to look afterward.

Scanning a batch of slides laid out on a flatbed as one large file produces a lot of dead, black space where the slide mounts do not allow the light through. Using the Epson slide holders creates even more dead space, only it is a mixture of black and white dead space (see illustrations above). Using Photoshop, we experimented with cutting out the images and pasting them into new Photoshop documents. That’s better looking, easier to make tonal adjustments for individual items (see the hungry pirates), and better suited to item-level descriptive indexing, but again, more production work that defeats any gains made by batch scanning. And you have to remember to flatten the file or the resultant file size is quite a bit larger.

What if a batch to be scanned could be limited to a common subject and thus be described as a whole? That would work only so long as the batch has some underlying commonality. The disparate group of slides I scanned did not lend itself to group description. In addition to the pirates at Hatteras, I did scan a batch of slides from an Azalea Festival parade as a second sample. But each grouping had a different number of items. Small groupings compared to larger ones could potentially lead to sloppy online presentation.

While I have a bunch of facts and figures related to scan times and file sizes using both methods, the biggest dilemma of all is an inherent flaw in all but the top-of-the-line flatbed scanners: the lack of edge-to-edge sharpness. In the end, quantitative statistics are moot because of that flaw.

Most scanners have a strip running through the center of the scanning area, its “sweet spot,” that produces its best quality scan. Once you move outside of that sweet spot, image quality drops off—extremely so in the corners. On the Epson 10000XL in our shop, the sweet spot seems to be in the center, falling off gradually to its worst in the corners. Scans of slides outside the zone have a soft, blended pastel look reminiscent of looking through a shower door with textured glass.

Here is a full scan, from the upper right corner of the batch of scans in the opening illustration. The scan below is a 100 percent crop that I then reduced to 440 pixels wide:

The result is perfectly satisfactory for online display at 440 pixels wide. But the devil is in the details! Here are two 100% crops, not sharpened, displayed at 440 pixels wide:

See the flat, distorted appearance of people’s faces? Note the lack of detail in the camera and tripod? If our only intended use of the scans was online display, this batch approach would suffice; for reproduction, however, they are clearly unsatisfactory.

Batting 0-for-2, it was time to plow through the Internet for a better solution. We think we’ve found one . . . the subject of the next post.