Many of the items that will be used for the online exhibition have never been scanned before. In addition, several items are written letters and documents that have never been transcribed–or whose transcriptions have been done in a fairly informal manner.

Early on, I checked with both my mentor and Andrew, the scholarly communication assistant to ascertain the scanning protocols/standards for the library. These standards follow best practices for digital collections and we have made sure to adhere to these standards for the items digitized for the exhibition. The challenge this week is learning that a few items that we have digitized images for have only been scanned as JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) files, rather than TIFF (Tag Image File Format) files.

This is not ideal, but lacking the original item to re-scan, we will have to make do with the JPEGs. Fortunately, this involves perhaps two items. Otherwise, we can be assured that the exhibition items will adhere to industry standards and will be usable in most other applications in future.

This is an important goal for the exhibition: not only do we want to create an engaging, interesting exhibition for the general public and Butler community, but we hope to promote and support scholarly uses of the materials.

This goal demands that the transcriptions of written sources meet basic scholarly standards for transcription, but also meets ADA compliance for access. My mentor and I discussed the level of scholarly apparatus that would be reflected in the transcriptions–we wanted to strike a balance between the demands of scholarship and ease of use for the general viewer. Thus, the transcriptions will scrupulously reflect exact words use, spelling, and format of the original document, but have none of the more complex notations and annotations common in scholarly editions.