The task of preserving the new digital records presents new problems.
Faust it8 target archive#
These could be postponed until someone wanted to adjust a copy of the archive file for a specific purpose, leaving the original untouched. The archivist who is pressed for time need not make any of the manipulations which the guidelines suggest. Relative to the cost of time spent in scanning and filing, the cost of storage on a disc or drive is tiny but throwing out the original file can cause confusion for ever after. …”Ĭlearly choosing option (b) is vital for a serious image archive. The choice depends upon the goals and resources for the project, with the second option requiring more extensive resources to create and maintain large files that may never be used and include reference targets when possible.īoth types of master images could be included in an archive. (a) to make a master image that has tone and color carefully adjusted to correct fading and exposure, or (b) to make a master image that represents the tone and color for the physical condition of the item at the time of digitization without correction of fading or exposure. This invalidates the file as an archive, especially if the original photographic print or transparency has also been thrown away. However, among the procedures which the “Western States Digital Imaging Best Practices” document lists as ‘best practice’ it includes deleting the original file, and keeping only the manipulated version as a ‘master-file’. The construction of an audit trail is described in the Adobe document, “Digital Image Integrity”. Digital images are intrinsically more proof against tampering than analogue images, but only if they are stored with the audit trail which records the changes, if any, which have been made to the original digital file. Ensuring that this is possible is known as maintaining image integrity. The resulting picture can look quite different from the archive image, but a researcher should always be able to track back to the unaltered original and check through any changes that may have been made. It is true that the original archive file may not be suitable for all uses, for example a publisher may wish to enhance the image – perhaps by increasing contrast and removing blemishes – so that it would look better in a book or on the Internet. An inexperienced archivist may get immersed in this part of the book and, in his enthusiasm for manipulation, throw away the original file.
Faust it8 target manual#
He provides plenty of useful advice but, while he does mention the risks involved, the bulk of his manual describes ways in which an image may be manipulated. These practices have been taken as the basis for a number of instruction manuals, notably one written by Jim Kennedy. For those with low budgets and little experience in digitising their archives, several groups have issued guidelines – the “Western States Digital Imaging Best Practices” being among the best known. These advantages can appear so dazzling that the risks of digitising may be disregarded, especially by institutions which lack the funding and the expertise which the major museums can call upon. The benefits of digitising archives can seem immense: the archives become easier to index and retrieve than the original documents, and copies may be sent anywhere in the world almost instantly. Here, the painter and ArtWatch UK Journal’s picture/photography analyst, Gareth Hawker (- see his post of 10 January 2011 on photography in museums), discusses some of the dangers posed to archives by breath-taking but commercially driven and insufficiently examined technical developments in digital photography. Technical advances and their attendant risks are not abating. We subsequently learnt that the threat to archival material was more widespread and that it was being strongly resisted. As we reported on Febru(“Shedding archival records at the Tate and the Victoria and Albert Museum”), the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art had recently received a phone call from a Tate employee who said “you might like the curatorial photo archive because we’re about to throw it on to a skip”. The BBC discarded much irreplaceable historic material which, having been shot in black and white, was held technically obsolete on the arrival of colour productions. As Nicholson Baker famously showed in his book Double Fold ~ Libraries and the Assault on Paper, countless books, magazines and newspapers were destroyed when microfilm seemed (falsely) to be a better, more durable, more economical means of storing their “information”. Technological advances are often over-sold and deployed in haste.
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