Digitization Facility Tour
I toured a local facility specializing in digitization and microfilming recently. It was interesting to learn about everything that’s involved in making images of printed material.
A few of the rooms we looked at were painted completely black and fitted with special equipment and lighting for the photographing of print materials and other objects. The guide said most of a photographer’s time is spent adjusting the light in the rooms where images are being made and adjusting monitor and camera controls to get the colors as close as possible. Sometimes they try to do batch photographing of similar objects so that the photographer only has to set the lighting once or make minor adjustments between items. The guide said that often when they distribute their images, they include specifications for monitor settings so their clients can view the images better.
What fascinated me most about the tour was the time we spent in the microfilming room. I don’t remember ever seeing the equipment to make film or microfilmers at work. As I watched the filmers adjust a newspaper and books and take their pictures on the machines, I wondered how many people actually get to see how microfilm is made.
Microfilm is still the standard for preservation of newspapers and some other periodicals. I watched a man filming a newspaper. The newspaper pages were cut apart along the side fold, so he was only dealing with one page that seemed to be a standard size for a newspaper page: roughly 21 by 12 1/2 inches. Each page was already unfolded. A cart holding a stack of these separated pages was at his right. While seated, he picked up a page, placed it on a large glass table infront of him, lined it up, and pressed a foot pedal to make an image of a page. Then he turned the page over and made an image of the reverse side. When he finished, he put the page on another cart to his left. He was using a fairly new German machine that had a much better ergonomic design than some of the other machines in the room.
A woman in a corner was filming a book with an older machine that required her to stand. There seemed to be hand switches she used, as well as a pedal on the floor. She turned a page in the book, pressed the book against a pane of glass above it, then took the picture with an overhead camera. She seemed to need to move much more during her work than the seated workers. Another man filming a book used a machine that enabled him to sit. The footpedals seemed to free his hands to work with the book better. The speed at which he turned pages, pressed the book up against the glass pane, and took pictures of the pages was fairly rapid and the motion was rhythmic. Watching him turn pages, I wondered how many pages he could film in an hour and if he ever got to read any of the text as he worked. Perhaps someone with a photographic memory could read what he filmed. (It’s difficult for me to look at something with text on it without trying to read at least some of the text. Maybe I wouldn’t be a good microfilmer.)
In the next room, someone used a hand-cranked mechanism to quickly check a roll of microfilm for any major problems.
The guide, who used to work at another filming facility, mentioned that the workers here were known for the quality of their work.
