PDF/A revisited

Wonderful. We upgraded our computers to Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro! Now, of course, my procedure for archiving the Faculty and Staff lists no longer works. (See post of April 3, 2008–that’s how long I’ve been doing it)

I used to do it by printing to PDF where I could change to properties to PDF/A. Now the print job just hangs up.  If I make a PDF portafolio from the menu, I can’t make it PDF/A.  I’ve written to the Adobe Forum, and Adobe support.  I’ll let you know when (if) I figure it out.  As always, if you have figured it out, please let me know.

I’ve decided to take the WordPress challenged to write every week this year.  Wish me luck.

Deteriorating newspapers

We are in the process of evaluating the space we have left for archives and special collections.  At this point we have shelves full of acidic newsprint in the form of old bound newspapers.  They have all been microfilmed and we don’t let anyone touch them because they are falling apart.

If you are in the same situation, are you committed to keeping them?  Why, or why not?  I know you’re out there.   As always, any help or ideas you can give.

Persistence of Memory

I’ll bet you all thought I died.  Not yet!  The month of December got away from me completely.  If anyone suggests going to a conference in December I recommend against it!!!

The conference was great and I had fun with Becky Simmons, RIT archivist, and folks I met there.  It was “Persistence of Memory: Sustaining digital collections.” put on in Chicago by NEDCC.

There was much too much for me to share in this blog so I’ll give you some quotes and recommend such conferences.

Paul Conway, U of Mich

• It’s the end of preservation as we know it, and I feel fine.
• The death of the microfilm industry in near.

Bernard Reilly, Center for Research Libraries

• Diversification: how many ways can the same content be “sold”

Simon Tanner, King’s College London

• · Goal: to make our institution feel like the Wichita Lineman: “I want you more than need you, and I need you for all time.”

David Liroff, Public Service Media

• · “If you continue to play by the old rules you will fail…but the new rules haven’t been written.”

• · “If humans are achieving global consciousness, we are it’s memory”

I’ll try be be more blog regular in the new year.  Have a great year!!

Archives Survey

We were part of the RRLC Conservation/Preservation Project and last week we had a visit from John F. Dean, former director of the Department of Preservation at Cornell.  He spent about four hours with me, asking and answering questions, looking at the collections and environment and making suggestions.  He was so helpful, I felt like I got a great class in archives in a few hours.

That was Thursday and he had a report to us on Monday!  He praised the colleges’ support of the archives, the enthusiasm of our student workers, and the value of some of our rare books.  He also had recommendations we will be able to use to convince the administration of our need for equipment to log the temperature and relative humidity, a HEPA filter vacuum cleaner, and water alarms.

We also need to shelve the rare books by size and he gave suggestions.  He got me interested in learning more about rare book librarianship, so I’ve started scoping out resources.

I’m also rethinking the amount of time and materials we are putting into some collections that have been sitting here forever.  More thoughts on that soon.

Using Adobe PDF to make viewbooks viewable.

There seems to be much repetition with in our photograph collection.  Many early viewbooks were taken apart and cataloged as separate images.  The student workers alerted me to the fact that they seemed to be scanning images that they had already scanned.  When there was more than one image on a page, we have scanned each separately.

I decided to catalog the whole viewbook as an item, so they started scanning them as whole pages, text and all. My first thought was to make each page a separate holding.  I’m glad to say that it dawned on me to make the whole viewbook one pdf file.  I used the genre heading “viewbooks” from AAT so they can all be found easily in the catalog.

This means that the same image can be found in the catalog with it’s own subject tracings, and as part of the viewbook from which it came.

I’m very happy with the results.

Preservation 101

In the free moments between moving “stuff”, I’ve start working my way through the online course Preservation 101: Preservation Basics for Paper and Media, presented by the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC)

I just finish Session 1: Introduction to Preservation and found it quite helpful. I lot of it I already knew and skimmed. I do feel like some holes in my information got filled, so it was worth the time. The timing seems prefect, since we are having to move almost everything, for evaluating what is most in need of preservation.

I have the time to read this morning because the shelves I was going to move “stuff” to this morning weren’t in place yet. Oh well.

My beloved minions return.

My student workers are back and I am so happy. They add so much life to the archives!

I’ve come up with some special projects for a few of my seniors.  Jessica Julius, primo scanner, it reviewing everything yet to be scanned to determine if there are some things in the files that can be cataloged by not scanned, e.g. library party circa 1975.  I had a question yesterday asking if there are photos I wouldn’t bother to catalog.  I figure, if you don’t intend to catalog them, you might as well toss them now.  No one will be able to find them, and whoever follows you in the job will come upon them and have to decide what to do with them.

I’m asking Sarah Rosemarino, primo phase box maker, to check to old library accessions books to see what books we can find in the S.C.C. (special closed collection) that were originally given by Benjamin Hale.  We are thinking of setting up a Hale Collection.

I’m still working on ideas for Kate Schuster, Tiffany Bennett and Betsy Dingman.  I’m losing half my staff to graduation.

Social Networking AND Photo digitization

Lone Arrangers of SAA now has a group on Facebook!

I posted on the discussion board asking about batch processing in Photoshop and learned, right away, from Florence Paisley that it was possible.  That got me started searching help again and I figured it out!!

Thank you, Florence

Thank you, LoneArrangers

Thank you, Facebook

Photo digitization, again

Well, I’ve worked out the procedure for automating the resizing of photos for the OPAC and for thumbnails. I was hoping that I could do the “save as. jpg” and “save as _t.jpg” as well, but apparently you can’t automate “save as.” My other dashed hope was to select a whole folder of images to resize at one time. It seems they still have to be done one by one.

I’ve done three disks so far. The first I worked out the bugs, the second I wrote up the procedure while I did it, the third I followed the written procedure. I think I’m good to go. I’ll add the page to my “Archives Manual.”

If any of you have hints on streamlining this process, I’d love to hear them!

Display cases on photo digitization

We decided to do the display cases this month documenting the process we go through to  take our photos from the filing cabinets, to the Voyager catalog.  I took some snaps to show off the process.

Here is Kate Schuster preparing photos for scanning.

And Jessica Julius scanning.