Table of Contents
Scanning Best Practices
This page is for a comparison of existing digitization best practices for manuscripts and a description of SCUA's best practices.
Page is a rough example. Needs much more work…
Comparison of Best Practices for Manuscript Digitization
There is a dearth of practical advice on digitizing manuscripts. Following is a survey of existing best practices in other institutions that could be applied to manuscript digitization.
The best practices surveyed are:
Imaging Resolution for Mansucripts
Only UMD specifies manuscripts as a specific format. For NARA and BCR, the suggestions in the table are for text documents, which includes typescript and handwritten.
| Digital Imaging dpi Requirements | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| 24-bit color | Bitonal | Compression | |
| BCR | 400 dpi 1) | 600 dpi | LZW ok |
| NARA | 400 dpi (use 8-bit grayscale) | 600 dpi (for high contrast documents only) | LZW, ZIP for images in active use |
| UMD | 300-500 dpi | 600 dpi | No |
| SCUA | 300 dpi | Color for all documents | LZW |
Why we choose what we did
Both BCR and NARA's suggestions come out of a preference to use 8-bit grayscale as a preferred bit depth for handwritten materials. We felt that the extra storage concerns to scan in 24-bit color were minimal and that the resulting image would be much more viewable and satisfying to the user. We felt that 300 dpi was of sufficient quality and seemed to be supported by the prevailing best practices. To save storage, we choose to use LZW lossless compression, which is supported by BCR and NARA. Since our images will be sitting in an actively used digital repository, and used to generate derivatives on-demand, we felt they would be in active use, fulfilling NARA's one main requirement.
