Category Archives: Digitization

News and features relating only to digitization

Lantern slide. A washed-out looking view of a clearing with a few shrubs, bushes, and train depot with larger trees in the background. In the distance is the Loma Linda Sanitarium, a long building with a tower.

Lantern Slides

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We recently began a new project in the digitization area of the Center – scanning the thousands of lantern slides in our collection. Lantern slides were first introduced ten years after the invention of photography, and allowed images to be viewed by large groups. This was much like slide transparencies of a few years ago. The Center has an extremely large quantity of these slides, and none of them have been cataloged before now. The small box of 31 lantern slides we began with contained photos and drawings of Adventist institutions and images used for evangelistic sermons on Daniel and Revelation. We scanned the slides at our standard photograph resolution (600 dpi), which will allow printing of the image up to letter size without loss of quality. We have archived these images and we have made a web version available for electronic use which you can view and download on our website (click on the Lantern Slides album). We only have 31 images now, but there will be many more coming in the next few years!
Juliette Johnson, Digitization Manager / Enjoys digitizing her father’s slide collection from their missionary days in her spare time.

Art Dmytriyev, a graduate student at the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary, digitizes rare and fragile books on the Indus book scanner.

Digitization Projects at the Center

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What do the Monterey, Michigan SDA Church record book, the Advent Shield and Review from 1844-45, and A Sketch of the Christian Experience and Views of Ellen G. White with Hiram Edson’s signature on the cover have in common? All these items were digitized last month by the CAR digitization team! Things have really changed and we are excited to see the results.

At the beginning of the year, we purchased a Kodak sheet-fed scanner that has allowed us to scan loose pages and cut books at a rate of 30 pages a minute (front and back)! We are using this machine to scan the books that we can cut and to digitize the White Document Files (see insert). The software allows for each scan to render two images, one in color for archiving, and one in black and white to compile into a format that will enable it to be read online.

To date this machine has produced over 2,500 files that have been subsequently attached to our library catalog. We are currently working to scan the entire collection of 2,700 White Document Files.

In May 2012, we purchased a flatbed camera scanner that allows us to digitize items that are more fragile, such as our vault books and other rare manuscripts. An item, such as a book, is placed on the platform and a sheet of glass is lowered over it. The scanner then makes a pass over the item with bright LED lights and takes a picture. The software is then able to crop out the borders and render a perfect scan of the item. We spent a few months testing and getting the kinks out, and we are now in full production with the goal of digitizing the entire vault collection of books. It takes about 10 seconds to scan a two-page spread, with the post-processing of compiling the images into a format to be read online taking about 10 minutes for the average size book. Last month we produced 210 items to attach to the catalog, comprising 6,000 images, most of which were vault materials.

Our goal has always been to preserve our precious materials, but with the advent of the new equipment, we are now able to make the materials we scan quickly available to our patrons. While not all of the items we scan will be attached to our catalog due to copyright laws, we hope to provide our patrons with a much wider selection of digital materials within the next year.

To browse our growing collection of digital titles, visit our library catalog at http://andrews.edu/library and type “Andrews Digital Library” in the search box.