Day 3 - Digitization of Analogue and Physical Materials.

Day 3 - Digitization of Analogue and Physical Materials.

Today we were taught about digitisation of analogue and physical materials and the importance there of. We were also taught how to do the digitisation and cleaning of the digitised images or documents ourselves.

The day started out with a short lecture on what digitisation entails, why it is needed and used, and the whole process of digitisation from start to the finished product. After that we went down to the digitization centre of the library and shown how the different machines are used to scan in the different books, maps, paintings, etc. into a digital format that will be cleaned up at a later state. The clean-up process is very important as the scanned files can be discoloured or damaged due to old age and thus they have to be cleaned to make them reusable and legible.

We were then taught how to do the clean-up process ourselves and tasked with cleaning up a bunch of files, one of those can be seen above. Whilst we were busy doing the clean-up process they took groups of us to the MakerSpace in the library and showed us the process of doing 3D scanning of physical objects like sculptures, etc.

We were also tasked with answering the question of what is need to start a digitisation centre? The two most important things will be a high quality flatbed scanner like the supra scanner and a high quality pc with a good graphics processor, CPU and RAM in order to efficiently process the high quality images and files being produced by the scanner. You can buy adobe Photoshop for the clean-up process, but it is not mandatory as you can use Gimp, a free alternative to Photoshop. You will also need Adobe Acrobat in order to put multiple files together, like the pages of a book, as they are saved as individual files after the clean-up process. These are the most important hardware and software requirements, but it is my personal opinion that patience will play the largest role in the success or failure of the center.

All in all, today was a very eventful and informative day and I very much enjoyed learning about the process of digitisation, especially the clean-up process. I look forward to starting with RDM tomorrow.