FPICs project

Digitizing Faculty Personal Image Collections

Any faculty member interested in having their personal research slide collection digitized must contact the Visual Resources Curator to initiate digitization.

Disclaimer:

Faculty member must know that we have no set ‘turn-around time’ as to how soon the slides will be digitized, but if you have a deadline in mind, make this known and we will try to accommodate it to the best of our abilities.

Pre-digitizing responsibilities of the faculty member:

• Must recruit his/her own students for scanning of the collection.* 

• Must divide entirety of slides to be digitized into small groups (anywhere from 5-100 slides in one group). One can make as many groups as needed to accommodate the entire collection.

• Ideally these slides will be grouped topically so that common data for each group can be assigned. Common data, or keywords, for each group need to be clearly relayed in writing on the FPICs accession form.
  
  For example, a group of slides that are various folios of one particular manuscript might have common data/keywords such as:
  
  Bonn; Universitats Bibliothek; Ms. 384; Illuminated Manuscripts; Illuminations
  
  Or a set of images from an archaeological dig might have common data/keywords such as:
  
  Greece; Athens; July 1995; Student Research; Keramikos cemetery
  
  The data/keywords have no hierarchy; they are simply words with which you are tagging this group in order to retrieve them later in a keyword search via an online database. Additionally, data on individual slides will be recorded by student workers and will serve as additional keywords. Slides with nothing written on them will have no additional data recorded. Dates and personalized slide or accession numbers are recorded in separate fields for browsing and sorting purposes.***Data is recorded as accurately as your handwriting is legible, either on physical slides or on accession sheet.

• Must mark physical groups within slide box or boxes so we can know where one groups ends and another begins. 

• Must  meet with the Visual Resources curator for an informational meeting with some of your slides to understand how the process works, what information will be recorded, how and what the end result will be. 

*Why must faculty members recruit their own student workers?

Ideally, a student with whom you already have a relationship may take more time and be more careful with your collection and be a bit more invested in the outcome of this project. Also, if he/she is already familiar with your work, he/she may be relied upon to fill in additional data on an image-by-image basis when slides are not marked with anything.  If you cannot find a student worker, we can post an ad and find one for you, but we highly encourage you to find students you trust.

Why isn’t my data going to be divided up into fields, such as Title, Creator, Period, etc.?

We aren’t using the same granularity for cataloging image through FPICs because it would simply take too much time. In order for the data from your slides to be interpreted correctly and inserted into the correct data fields would take intensive training on my part for the cataloging software and on your part for the data. Instead, we are recording information as an archive would: recording collection level information and item level description.

The advantages are: the project will move along faster; you’ll be able to use your images sooner; and through MDID your data will be keyword searchable making each image ‘findable’ in the database.

The disadvantages are: having metadata that is helpful to only you; data is not divided into standard fields, making it harder to share the collections with other institution in the future. If you anticipate that sharing your collection with a larger audience might be something you are interested in, we should address this in our initial meeting.

When slides are finally uploaded into the Colgate MDID database, an email will be sent to the faculty member from the Visual Resources Curator. Your slides will live in a separate collection in the database accessible to the VR Curator, yourself and anyone else you designate access to. The site can be visited at http://mdid.colgate.edu  Log in with your Colgate ID and password.

Any questions should be directed to the Visual Resources Curator.