Fulfill Your Digital Preservation Goals with a Budget Studio. Yongli Zhou. Information Technology and Libraries. April 4, 2016. [PDF]
Article about finding a cost effective solution for digitizing materials as part of preservation goals. Many institutions use in-house high-end scanners to scan historical and other materials. "No digitization equipment or system is perfect. They all have trade-offs in image quality, speed, convenience of use, quality of accompanying software, and cost." The article discusses in depth the comparison tests for using digital cameras for digitizing, as opposed to the expensive scanners that do not fit in many library budgets. The result is that for most archival materials a Digital single-lens reflex camera (DSLR) camera will do a better job than an overhead scanner. In most of the cases, the camera produced superior images. "This paper compares images delivered by a high-end overhead scanner and a consumer-level DSLR camera, discusses pros and cons of using each method, demonstrates how to set up a cost-efficient shooting studio, and presents a budget estimate for a studio."
2 comments:
Interesting article & I like the hands on approach. The conclusions seem convincing, however what I miss is a more thorough and objective methodology for the measurement of the image quality. Apart from the ColorChecker card; no targets have been used. This means that there's no way to measure sampling efficiency, noise, color accuracy etc., according to guidelines such as Metamorfoze (https://www.metamorfoze.nl/sites/metamorfoze.nl/files/publicatie_documenten/Metamorfoze_Preservation_Imaging_Guidelines_1.0.pdf).
Measurement of these quality criteria can be done with specialised tools, such as ImCheck.
So don't dump your professional equipment yet ;)
Post a Comment