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.

Bow River - Banff, Alberta (ARLIS/NA conference)

Spent three wonderful days in Banff at the ARLIS/NA annual conference over the weekend. Taught my "Digitization Strategies for Preservation and Access" workshop on Friday to a nicely balanced group from museums, libraries and archives.

This workshop was the first to explore my current thinking that we are at a convergence with better/faster/cheaper technology (Moore's Law); intelligent, automated workflows; and a tremendous demand for universal access over the internet. This convergence is making commercial mass digitization projects, like Google's, possible. I believe this mass digitization, at preservation quality levels, is now feasible for cultural institutions as well.

Greetings from Banff

The ARLIS/NA conference is in Banff, Alberta Canada this year and what an inspiring location!


More to report in next post.