Presentations & Abstracts
The J. Paul Getty Trust
Todd Swanson | J. Paul Getty Trust
Michael Smith | J. Paul Getty Trust
Adjusting to the impact of COVID, Getty Digital Imaging was forced to and adjust to, and continually plan for, an uncertain and rapidly changing world. In response to COVID, the Getty campuses closed to all non-essential work from March 2020 until September 2021. As a result, the Getty Imaging Department was abruptly confronted with the task of finding new ways to approach and carry out their work.
Todd Swanson (Head of Getty Digital Imaging) and Michael Smith (Getty Digital Imaging Manager, Museum Studios) will speak to the changes they have implemented, ideas they are currently working through, highlight opportunities that presented themselves as well as setbacks along the way.
This presentation also intends to prompt follow-up discussions regarding the impact of COVID on the workplace, encourage others to share stories and ideas, ask questions, and identify areas of needed growth and development that we can address together as a community.
Transmissions: A Case Study in Coordinating Patron Requests with Library Digitization Projects
Arlene Yu | Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
In late 2017, as part of an exhibition being planned at the Whitney Museum, the artist Nick Mauss requested the digitization of over 800 of the 2,840 color images from the Carl Van Vechten slide collection in the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Dominating the exhibition both numerically and visually, projections of the slide images were described by one critic as “showstopping.”
A previous DT roundtable presentation on the digitization of the Van Vechten slides described the work of the New York Public Library’s digital team. This presentation builds on that narrative from the curatorial perspective, by delving into the negotiation of a patron request for partial digitization with the Library’s subsequent decision to digitize the entire collection in six weeks, all while preserving the collection’s original order, both physically and in image metadata. Partial digitizations deriving from patron requests can often be more complex than planned digitizations of entire collections, and this case study provides some strategies for approaching similar projects.
Digitizing Early 20th Century Estonian Photography
Aap Tepper | Estonian National Archives
Our project aims to digitize early to mid-century Estonian photographic heritage from 24 memory institutions across Estonia. The goal is to preserve, digitize, and give access to important collections which open up a unique perspective of an “Estonian experience” throughout a period featuring turbulent times with regime changes and the period of the first Estonian independence. This is a massive logistical and technical undertaking, especially during a global pandemic. My presentation will introduce the processes of mapping, gathering, digitizing, and publicizing these special materials.
Conquering New Frontiers with Rapid Digitization Technology: Expanding and Streamlining Our Mission at the State Archives of Florida
Dr. Joshua Goodman | The State Archives of Florida
The State Archives of Florida recently acquired a PhaseOne iXH 150MP camera and DT Versa digitization station. For the past nine months, the staff of Florida Memory, the Archives’ digitization and outreach program, have been experimenting with new workflows to take advantage of the PhaseOne’s capacity for rapid, high-quality imaging. In this presentation, Dr. Josh Goodman, Archives Historian at the State Archives of Florida, will describe several recent projects illustrating how the PhaseOne is changing how the Archives is creating and organizing digital collections, and how it’s helping us expand our outreach with cultural heritage institutions around the state.
Digitization at the General Archives of Puerto Rico: Our path to be FADGI compliant
Hilda Teresa Ayala González | The General Archives of Puerto Rico
In 2019, the General Archives of Puerto Rico began designing its first digitization center and, in 2020 received a major funding opportunity to upgrade the space and enhance the work to be FADGI compliant. As we are just coming out of our first year, in this presentation we will walk you through the changes made in terms of, equipment, software, space, and team. We’ll share our workflow, the areas where we are still “stuck” and, our plans for moving forward to accomplish our goal.
AI Keywording at Smithsonian
Cecilia Peterson | Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections
Ankur Patel | Human AI
Doug Peterson | Digital Transitions
Metadata greatly increases the value and accessibility of digitized collections, but it can take hundreds of hours to enter even basic metadata manually. AI offers significant promise, but the most commonly used AI models from Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are general-purpose in nature; they lack the subject matter expertise and heritage-specific lexicon required for most cultural heritage institutions. Cecilia Peterson of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage worked with Doug Peterson of Digital Transitions and Ankur Patel of Human AI Collaboration to explore the viability, practicality, and accuracy of a custom-trained AI metamodel that combined visual, textual, and namespace proximity to apply an existing vocabulary of terminology to a folk music focused collection. We will present our findings – what worked well, what failed miserably, and what the cultural heritage community can learn from our efforts.
Note: this work was supported by a DT ArCHER Grant.
It’s the Little Things: Tips, Tricks, and Hacks from the Field
Doug Peterson | Digital Transitions
Sometimes the smallest tips pay the biggest dividends. After a year of owning a service division, and from conversations with our clients, we’ve accumulated a list of simple ideas that can help make digitization faster, more efficient, and more comfortable for the operator. Among the ideas that will be presented are how to set up the two-camera DT BC100 with a single computer, how to set up dual triggering options that make systems more accessible and flexible, and how to set up a workstation in an area where you can’t paint the walls or ceiling. If you have a tip, trick, or hack you’d like us to share, please contact [email protected].
DT Heritage
Hannah Storch | DT Heritage
Presentation abstract coming soon.
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