A Day in the Digital Lab

So in my other life, when I'm not taking germy money from germy people, I work for a stipend in the Brooklyn Museum's Digital Collections and Services Lab. (note: I have a cold, which I am surly about and blame retail for. However, I like it that my voice is an octave lower than normal, because now when I sing Billie Holiday standards in the shower, it sounds more authentic. In case you were curious.)

I am at the Lab currently, scanning, so I thought I would give you an account. I am being funded as part of a grant given by the IMLS (Institute of Museum and Library Services) to the BM. This grant is used for scanning and uploading on the website some areas of the collection (over 1,000,000 all told) which are underrepresented. Prior to this, most of the images on the website were "greatest hits" of the collection, which left out a lot of works. So, the curators went in and picked out the objects they liked and found interesting, and gave us a list, and we've been scanning them. My realm is the black and white photonegatives. (Photonegatives are film, like you would have in a normal, non-digital camera, except they are a larger size. And since they are negatives, what appears black on them would be white in the actual work, and what is white would be black.)

Anyway, here is what I do:
1. Consult the master list of the IMLS objects, and start pulling slides out of the boxes. They are arranged by their accession number, which is the year in which they entered the museum. For example, 12.53.2 would be something acquired in 1912. It was the 53rd group of objects acquired that year, and the 2nd object in that group. There are 89 boxes of black and white photonegatives.
2. Once I have a pile, I power on the scanner, which is a flat thing (technical terminology, ha) which opens and has two large glass plates. I clean the plates with a chamois cloth (which traps more dust than a regular cloth, allegedly.)
3. I put on one white glove, like Michael Jackson c. 1985. With the white-gloved hand (finger-prints = VERY BAD), you grip a negative in the corner by your thumb and forefinger. Drag the cloth across both sides of it to remove dust. Hold it up to the light--the dust will show up as white specks, and then you can keep cleaning accordingly.
4. Once the negative looks pretty clean, I hold it under the light to figure out which side has emulsion on it. You can tell which side is emulsion-ed because it will not transmit light. The non-emulsion side will reflect light back at you. In these scanners the emulsion side goes UP, but it's different for other machines (were I to put the emulsion side DOWN, the image would be scanned reversed, and I would have to redo it.
5. The scanner I use fits 8 images comfortably, so once 8 are loaded then it scans and I have a few minutes to get tea or blog (yo!) or email or wander around.
6. Once the batch is done scanning, you save them in very specific folders (there is a whole naming process for each image, involving "bw" and "IMLS" and "view 1" and "a-c" and a bunch of stuff that normal people don't need to know about.) Then you open them in photoshop and crop, straighten, color correct (which for the black-and-whites involves grayscale, curves and layers and little eye-dropper looking tools.) Finally you blow them up to actual pixel size and delete any imperfections/dust/scratches. My problem is I tend to over-edit and delete things which are flaws of the work, and not just flaws of the negative (like if a page from a manuscript is torn, I have a tendency to edit out the rip, when it is really a part of the work. If that makes any sense.)
7. After all that, you look up the image in a bunch of databases, make sure the accession number is right, update the info in Microsoft Access and email a bunch of people to let them know that it is ready to be uploaded to the website.
8. Repeat. Indefinitely.

Now, if you think this sounds boring and monotonous, you are darn right it is. However, sometimes you get either totally awesome or totally ridiculous images, which breaks up the boring. Like today, on the awesome scale, I got a Rothko watercolor. I've had a few Hoppers (mmm) and some Mary Cassatt's which were cool. The JJ Audobon nature prints are fun, because they are very stylized, and you can play with the contrasts--plus the foxes are CUTE! Some of the Asian collection's hanging scrolls are great, and there is one really fun one which is a series of insects, who all have little humanoid faces...some are grumpy, some are smiling, which cracked me up. On the ridiculous scale are the period rooms, which were photographed in the '70's (the BM has a whole floor of period rooms, mostly from the 19th century). The food that is displayed on the tables is usually pretty funny--today we got one that was turkey, pot roast (we think), shrimp, peas, mushrooms, and what looks like goblets full of jell-o.

In the next few weeks I get to start scanning papyrus slides from the Egyptian collection, so that could be neat. (What is neat is that the actual photographs are over a century old and on glass plates instead of film. So at least that'll be different.) And then next time you go on a museum's website, think about how many people it actually takes to get those images to you!