Why Direct Digital Capture?

Those familiar with museum digital imaging projects other than the DAC Digital Imaging Initiative may be curious why we've decided to proceed with direct digital capture, rather than photographing objects and then scanning transparencies at a resolution high enough to support print publication (or using a flatbed scanner for direct capture at higher resolution).

The answer is simple: only a very small percentage of our holdings has been photographed to film, and we can't afford the operating cost of going through a film stage for images of any substantial number of objects. (We did experiment early on with scanning 4x5 transparencies of several objects, but this was not a realistically scalable approach here.) Combined with our desire to begin providing screen-worthy images in order to serve our educational mission as a university museum, this practical limitation led us to undertake direct digital capture in a way designed to incur virtually zero risk of damage to objects from light, heat, or physical contact.

Our decision to use a digital camera rather than a flatbed scanner was based on both preservation and financial concerns. After careful consideration of scanners, substantial concerns about visible and UV light, heat, surface contact, physical deflection of paper supports, and limitations of scan dimensions remained unresolved. Since our projected uses for these images don't include high-quality print publication, we decided that a digital camera capable of yielding screen-worthy images would be sufficient to begin with. Building on that experience, we are now moving to higher-resolution digital-camera capture.

The chief benefit of using a camera is a lower risk of damage to original objects. The chief drawback is reduced resolution, since a scanner at any given purchase cost would yield both more pixels per inch and larger total pixel dimensions. In the first direct-capture phase of the project, we used a camera that produced images roughly with 1,000 pixels in each dimension; we now are beginning to work with one with 5000 x 3750 resolution, which will allow us to build a more use-neutral digital archive. We've also begun to develop a means of offering Web access to zoomable images, as seen in a beta page now online.