Another successful Summer Educational Institute

This was the second year I taught at SEI, the weeklong joint-venture of the VRA and ARLIS/NA. This year the host institution is Reed College in Portland, Oregon. What a beautiful campus! And a fantastic group of attendees (45 students and ~12 faculty). Most were from slide libraries with a few from archives and museums.

Wednesday was my "Imaging Day" and I covered digitization best practices, digital copystand (overhead scanning), project management, workflow optimzation and color management. Also demonstrated some useful Photoshop CS2 tips, use of Nikon Capture 4 and introduced everyone to Thumbs Plus Pro from Cerious Software. This fast, powerful image browser and batch processor is a favorite in our scanning operations and the only complaint we've heard is it isn't available for the Mac.

We moved ten big 16 bit TIFF files, created during my digital copystand demo, over the Reed network so the students could work on the files on the iMacs in the ETC. Seems like we could have used considerably more time for this hands-on segment.