-------- 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 ================================== 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" ==================================