[Leica] Re: Scanning Tina's archives

[lrzeitlin at optonline.net (Lawrence Zeitlin)]

Tina,

I had the same experience as you when it came to scanning archives of  
negatives. We had about 25,000 35 mm B&W negatives from the 40's  
through 60's showing industrial processes, workers, families,  
locations. A colleague of mine was compiling a book on the evolution  
of the US as an industrial nation and wanted a large selection of  
photographs. Today he might have been advised to go to China. Each  
negative took about 5 minutes to scan at high resolution. That would  
have taken a full year of 40 hour weeks. We hired a graduate student  
to do the job but after reviewing her work we found it to be  
inadequate and had to let her go. Anyway, we came to the realization  
that since only about 10% of the negatives showed scenes of interest,  
there was no point in scanning the whole archive in high resolution.

Fortunately most of the negatives had been cut into strips and filed  
in polyethylene storage pages. Each of the pages was numbered. Our  
scanning software had a lower resolution Batch Scanning mode which  
enabled the scanning time to be considerably reduced. We could scan  
all the negatives within a month, but of course, with no alteration  
or adjustment. Once the negative strip was inserted into the carrier,  
the process was automatic. The graduate student was rehired and set  
to work.

Each page was stored as a separate file, numbered identically to the  
storage sheet. We could view each file as a slide show. If an image  
proved interesting, the file number was marked.
At leisure we could look at the actual negatives in the storage  
sheet, identify the photo of interest, and do a high quality scan.  
Conceptually the process was like viewing a contact sheet displayed  
on a 20" screen.

So don't do a quality scan of all your negatives. Not all images are  
worth saving. At least mine aren't.

Larry Z