July 31, 2004
Lewis Carroll Scrapbook
Speaking of Alice in Wonderland (we were last week anyway), check out this cool site of The Lewis Carroll Scrapbook from the Library of Congress (via LII). According to the site, "the scrapbook contains approximately 130 items, including newspaper clippings, photographs, and a limited number of manuscript materials, collected between 1855-72" by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll).
And for those interested in the archive angle of this, "The Lewis Carroll Scrapbook contains approximately two hundred un-numbered pages, sixty-three of which contain clippings and writing. The remaining pages are blank and are not included in the online collection. There are seven loose, inlaid items that Carroll had presumably not yet pasted into the scrapbook. These seven items have been placed on page 64 of the scrapbook for presentation purposes. One of the seven inlaid items is an uncut issue of Punch, which the Library of Congress’s Conservation Division unfolded and laid flat for scanning. The entire scrapbook was evaluated and treated by the Conservation Division prior to scanning."
"Staff in the Digital Scan Center of the Library of Congress’s Office of Strategic Initiatives created the digital images for this project, using a Digibook high-production scanner. Each image was produced by scanning the item at a resolution of 300 dpi and converting the resulting proprietary file format to TIFF format. These TIFF files, which average approximately 40MB, are available to users for download and viewing from the Library’s server.
After scanning was completed, project staff copied, resized, and converted TIFF files to JPG and GIF file formats, using Image Alchemy software. GIF files were resized to 600-pixel widths on the short end and are used for initial page displays. JPG files were resized to 3000-pixel heights. Project staff manually created additional JPG files for subitems (scrapbook inserts), using Adobe Photoshop. These subitems are crops from the scrapbook pages, which were resized to a 600-pixel width on the short side."
Very cool!
Posted by Emily at July 31, 2004 11:04 AM