This Year’s Speakers & Topics:

Early Color Photography at National Geographic: Our Journey from Idea to Funded Federal Grant Project

Sara Manco, Julie McVey, Renee Braden, National Geographic Society

The National Geographic Society Archives holds the largest collection of early color photography in the United States: over 15,000 glass plate autochromes, Agfachromes, Dufaycolor, Finlaycolor photographs. The collection includes not only natural color photographs from Greenland to Japan, but also several notable color photographic “firsts.” The majority of the collection is currently undigitized and unpublished. This presentation will discuss the process of taking our ideas for digitizing these unique cultural heritage objects from “what-if?” to creating a fully-funded federal grant project to conserve and digitize the entire collection in partnership with DTCH and the Center for Conservation of Art and Historic Artifacts (CCAHA).

Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles, Reel to Reel

Todd Swanson, Getty

This project digitizes a pioneering collection generated by one of the world’s most recognized artists. Ruscha’s collection includes several hundred thousand images, hundreds of contact sheets, and the complete production archive for the artist’s canonical book Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966). These materials have been previously unavailable for research, scholarship, or exhibition and are a unique record of Los Angeles’s built environment’s gradual evolution. Ruscha’s street shoots are stored on motion picture film rolls and presented unique digitization challenges, which will be discussed in this presentation. Learn more about this project here.

Reproducing the Negative — Rendering Considerations and Solutions

Arnab Chatterjee and Spencer Zidarich, Digital Transitions

Best practices for digitizing film and other transmissive media have been well established through FADGI, Metamorfoze, and (upcoming) ISO guidelines. While they are technically demanding at the highest level, the capture process is relatively straightforward procedurally. However, there are certain variables in both capture and processing negatives that can greatly impact image rendering, even if these guidelines are met.

We will discuss two such variables, and approaches to control them. First, we will explore appropriate lighting considerations for the proper rendering of film as a 3-dimensional physical object, and then examine appropriate processing considerations for the rendering of film as a container of image content.

De-mystifying Grant Writing, Part 1: Creating Compelling Narratives That Funders are Excited to Support

Jan Peppler, PhD and Independent Consultant

The heart of every grant proposal is the narrative questions that ask you to explain why you need money and why you deserve the funding more than another organization and project. This is where novice grant writers struggle and seasoned writers can fall into a trap. While writing does take practice and a lot of editing, it is actually not that difficult if you know where to begin and how to follow through. This presentation provides insight into what a funder wants and how you, as the grant writer, can provide it in a way that is inspiring. Learn how to present your case professionally, while also compelling the funder to care and become invested in your success. You will come away from this presentation feeling energized, excited, and more determined than ever to share your story in a way that creates financing for the projects you believe in.

De-mystifying Grant Writing, Part 2: Finding Opportunities, Breaking Down Requirements, and Winning

Brady Wilks, DT Heritage

Sometimes making a project successful or ramping up the next big idea is limited by a lack of funding. Winning a grant is a great way to give your project or idea the financial boost it needs… but where are they and how do we win?

In this presentation, Brady will cover some of the basics in finding grant opportunities, variations in grant writing processes, and understanding the differences in grantor’s requests. Participants will learn about methods on how to approach the process of writing a grant, knowing what approach to select, and how to fulfill requirements while still telling a good story.

Collaboration to Exhibition: Harvey Milk Archives Take Flight

Christina Moretta and Mike Levy, The San Francisco Public Library

Kai Caemmerer, SFO Museum at the San Francisco International Airport

As two San Francisco city agencies, we present a case study on the collaboration between San Francisco Public Library (SFPL) and SFO Museum at the San Francisco International Airport for the exhibition Harvey Milk: Messenger of Hope, located in Harvey Milk Terminal 1. They will share their use of SFPL’s Digital Transitions Cultural Heritage system in digitizing archives and original photography from the Harvey Milk Archives-Scott Smith Collection, Hormel LGBTQIA Center for exhibition at the Airport. They will also highlight the subsequent exhibitions, projects, and opportunities that arose from this initial partnership.

An EPICC Project: A Partnership with the National Museum of Natural History’s Paleo-Biology Department

Hannah Storch, DT Heritage

Holly Little, Smithsonian Institution

DT Heritage has partnered with the ​Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) Department of Paleobiology and the Smithsonian Institution Digitization Project Office (DPO) on a mass digitization project in support of the Eastern Pacific Invertebrate Communities of the Cenozoic (EPICC) Thematic Collections Network. These specimens serve as digital records of the collection and diagnostic tools, enabling scientists to better understand how marine ecosystems have responded to events such as the transition to the modern icehouse climate, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), and more. The EPICC project began with a pilot project in 2017, followed by two production phases in 2017-2018 and 2019-2020, which together resulted in the digitization of over 500,000 marine invertebrates and their specimen labels. As this project has progressed, DT Heritage has found ways to increase efficiency and optimize workflows while maintaining museum standards and best practices.

New Space, New Capabilities: USHMM’s Archival Digitization Project and the Sobibor Perpetrator Collection

Justin Donaldson and Julie Schweitzer, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Since 2015, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Archival Digitization Project has generated over 1 million images, helping to preserve and provide access to our personal paper collections. This year the imaging operation moved into a custom-built digitization suite, which will allow not only increased image output, but also a wider variety of document types. The project’s workflow involves staff from multiple departments who arrange, describe, and provide conservation treatment for documents before they go in front of the camera. Our team’s close collaboration made it possible to rapidly digitize a recent important acquisition, the Sobibor Perpetrator collection. The collection includes newfound photographs documenting the layout and staffing of the Sobibor killing center and the implementation of the Holocaust. Digitizing this collection proved to be a unique challenge, but our teamwork enabled us to publish the collection online just before the pandemic upended our routines.

The New Phase One iXH 150MP and 72mm MkII lens

Yair Shahar, Phase One Industrial

Last year the Cultural Heritage portfolio of products from Phase One was moved to their Industrial Division so that it could receive more dedicated and specialized allocation of R&D, sales and marketing resources. The first major result of this has been the release of the Phase One iXH 150MP and the Phase One 72mm MkII reprographic lens. Yair will discuss both of these solutions in detail, including their design intentions and test images. He will also provide some insight into Phase One’s CH product roadmap.

DT and DT Heritage New Products and R+D Preview

Doug Peterson, Digital Transitions

It’s cliche at this point to say that 2020 has accelerated previous trends, but at DT and DT Heritage, this could not be more true. We were already investing in custom coding for workflow improvements, artificial intelligence for enriching collections, and higher image quality in our capture systems, but the Remote Renaissance spurred by COVID-19 has pushed us to move even faster on those projects. During this presentation we’ll discuss three such projects. First, a new next-generation OCR engine that better handles handwritten materials, faded historical documents, and poor condition materials. Second, an online platform for remote QC of OCR, which allows CH personnel working from home to remotely contribute to the correction and approval process. And third, Pixel Flow 2.0, that our DT Heritage team is using to streamline post processing – vital as we’ve ramped digitization services more than 300% over the past year.