I haven’t had quite as much exciting news to share lately because the Digital Library Center has been focusing any free time–aside from keeping up with current projects–on trying to load some old files for the most recent segment of a multi-phased grant. The older files are from 1998-2004 and were included in the earlier grant phases, and were microfilmed instead of being digitized. The microfilm was later digitized, but the color pages still had to be scanned and so now we’re re-combining the grayscale and color pages, processing the images, adding bibliographic metadata, and loading and archiving the files. The process is slow going and often unexpected problems or just confusing oddities come up that require more time than these already time-consuming files require. While this sort of work isn’t as fast, easy, or fun as the rest of what we do, it’s still worth the extra effort to restore color to rare, colorful books and to enable access online and instead of on a microfilm reader.
2009-05-13