-------- Original Message --------
Subject:        Re: Wide format scanners
Date:   Wed, 18 Aug 2010 21:59:35 -0700
From:   Virginia R Hetrick PhD <[log in to unmask]>
To:     Maps, Air Photo, GIS Forum - Map Librarianship
<[log in to unmask]>



Ditto Ken's and Joel's comments, especially concerning metadata and
disk storage.  You can find VERY high quality disk storage for less
than 50USD/100GB, in fact, enough to make a "live" copy and an
"archive" copy though I'd suggest getting Archival Quality DVDs to
save your archive.  Delkin makes the most reliable ones and they
typically cost something like 80USD/25, but you get a 100 year
guarantee!  ;~)

In terms of choosing how to manage them, many open source (and free)
alternatives are out there.  The most important thing is to choose
something that will allow you to add metadata should you later decide
that other appropriate information should be associated with the
map(s).  It would be desirable to have some way to associate the
metadata with whatever mechanism you use to restrict/allow printing,
copying, etc., such that the metadata (if you choose) can be accessed
and copied, regardless of what the restrictions maybe on
printing/copying the actual maps.

It would also be desirable to have the maps scanned at two resolutions
(at least) such that you could have a thumbnail (or possibly somewhat
larger) image as a preview of the map and then a full-size one for
people to study.  For quality reasons, I'd suggest having the larger
one be a .tif (aka TIFF) image as this will give you the best color
fidelity and most likely also be a format that will be available
directly from the scanner.

Some of the large format scanners (one that I saw in Europe, I think
France) also have a format that's equivalent to Camera RAW which will
give you both the maximum spatial and color resolution of the
original, but you will have to process each one to get to the .tif
format and that takes somebody with serious color management skills.
I've been working on developing those skills for three years and I'm
still not close to having the skill level required to do it well.

Good luck on your project.

v
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Virginia R. Hetrick, here in sunny California
Email:  [log in to unmask]
"There is always hope."
My fave:  http://www.washington.edu/cambots/camera1_l.gif
There's no place like:  34N 8' 25.40", 117W 58'5.36"
if you can't be at:  48N 6' 59.9" 122W 59' 54.2"
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