“Digitization Project Comes to Grandview Library and Museum”
By Barbara Lauby
Article originally published in the April 23rd, 2008 issue of The Grandview Herald, and reprinted with permission. Photos by Barbara Lauby unless otherwise stated.
Grandview residents will soon be able to see their grandparents’ high school graduation pictures on the Internet. And the mastodon bone, and two panoramic views of downtown from the early 20th century, and a collection of different kinds of barbed wire from the late 19th century, and the Grandview History compiled in 1927 by the Pioneer Association.
Downtown Grandview 1921
(scanned from original photo in Library's collection)
Grandview’s museum and library collections will soon
join other collections from small and rural libraries and museums across
the state – on the Internet.
Selected items have been digitized for inclusion on the Washington State Library’s web site, thanks to an initiative called Washington Rural Heritage. The project is establishing a statewide digital repository to digitize and preserve historically unique collections from small and rural communities, and make the collections available to a much wider audience through the Internet.
Laura Robinson, a digital repository librarian from the State Library, visited Grandview a couple of weeks ago to scan and take photos of some 200 items selected by Jeanne Marie Coursey, museum care-keeper, and Linda Dunham, library director.
Dunham chose a thick, original, typed book, “The History of Grandview,” compiled in 1927 by the Pioneer Association, as the primary item to be digitized. The process went so quickly that Robinson and Dunham added some original photography by Asahel Curtis, and some other artwork in the art library.
Jeanne Marie Coursey, the museum
“care-keeper”, selected the earliest high school senior photos from
1910, 1913,1916-1918, 1927-28 and 1930. Two wide, panoramic views of
Grandview, most likely taken by Curtis, were also digitized, along with
a book of historical photos, a collection of different types of barbed
wire from the late 19th
century, and the mastodon bone.
In digitizing all these different items, Robinson
used a flat-bed scanner and a large, scan-back camera. The camera looks
like a portrait camera that uses a plate instead of film, but actually
works like a scanner.
“You open the lens,” Robinson explained, “and the
camera scans what it sees through the lens, just like a flat-bed
scanner.”
Digitizing an historical artifact is not quite like
snapping a photo of it. A great deal of time is spent readying an
artifact. In the case of the mastodon bone, for example, Robinson set up
a white paper background which would contrast with the color of the
bone. After positioning the bone, which is in two pieces, so the
interior, as well as the exterior, could be seen, she arranged the
lighting and reflectors to best show the colors and textures. She used a
color-match card, to ensure the colors that the image the camera
captures are accurate. Then she looked through the camera and fiddled
with lighting, reflection, and positioning, making seemingly minute
changes that, in the end, will capture the image as precisely as
possible.
Before removing the lens of the camera, Robinson turned the lights off and warned staff that she was about to take a picture. No one moved, because the exposure would take a few seconds and movement would affect the lighting.
The image then appeared on a
laptop and Robinson checked to make sure the image accurately reflected
the mastodon bone.
The process repeated itself many times over the course of the week that Robinson was here. And she’s coming back to do more – the first week in May. In addition, Ruth Dirk, senior library associate, will attend a follow-up workshop to learn how to do additional digitizing herself.
Although Grandview’s collection is not yet added to the State Library’s web site, you can go to http://www.washingtonruralheritage.org/ and get an idea of what it will look like by viewing Ritzville’s collection.
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